


Oxygen

by waterbird13



Category: The Old Guard (Movie 2020)
Genre: Booker is briefly present for a hot minute, Canon Appropriate Violence, Found Family, Multi, Nightmares, Post Movie, The Dreams, determined Nile, figuring this out, first year, hunt for Quynh, introspective, nile centric
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-15
Updated: 2020-11-26
Packaged: 2021-03-10 06:27:50
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 9
Words: 44,161
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27569797
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/waterbird13/pseuds/waterbird13
Summary: After her rude introduction to her new life, Nile has to work out the rest of what it means to be immortal with her new family.
Relationships: Andy | Andromache of Scythia/Quynh | Noriko, Joe | Yusuf Al-Kaysani/Nicky | Nicolò di Genova
Comments: 92
Kudos: 286





	1. Chapter One

**Author's Note:**

> Hello!
> 
> I am so excited to share this fic with you. I've been working on it for...quite a while now, despite the fact that the first twenty thousand words were written in two days. Yeah.
> 
> This is my immediately post-canon, first year fic. It's Nile-centric, but it's very family-focused.
> 
> General warnings for nightmares, not highly explicit trauma, and canon level violence.
> 
> Much thanks to my beta, lilolilyrae.
> 
> This fic is complete, and I'll be posting Saturdays, Mondays, and Thursdays.

After London, Andy takes them on a cross-continental road trip, refusing to surrender the wheel until somewhere in Germany, despite the gaping wound in her side, barely stitched together. When she agrees to surrender to Joe, switching into the back seat with Nile so Nicky can sit up front with Joe and be his navigator—which seems to lead to arguing about where, exactly, modern borders are, although Nile misses a lot of the finer details in translation—Andy leans her head against the window and is almost immediately asleep.

She wakes up every time someone honks their horn, or every time Joe takes an even mildly sharp turn, looks around blearily, and then goes back to sleep, seemingly having deemed them in the car safe.

Nile admires Andy’s commitment to her motto, sleep while you can. Nile, for her part, hasn’t really slept since…probably since she died, honestly. Sure, she’s nodded off now and again, but she doesn’t get much sleep, and certainly not in the car.

Nile is a little worried she’ll be testing how long it takes sleep deprivation to kill you, soon enough.

Joe and Nicky keep their voices quiet, probably to help the two in the back sleep, but it’s not enough for Nile. Not when her skin feels like a live wire.

Joe stops somewhere over the border into Poland. He navigates deftly, although he and Nicky seem to be lightly bickering about the route. Nile has to wonder the last time they were here, but doesn’t want to ask. Doesn’t know if she can process if they say something incredible, like  _ World War Two _ or something.

Andy is fully awake when Joe pulls into a drive, sitting upright. “Why are we stopping?”

Nicky is the one who turns around. “It has been fifteen hours, Andy, almost.”

“So?”

Joe sighs. “So, I would like a bed, Boss. And a hot shower.” He looks up at the building he’s stopped in front of, which certainly doesn’t look up to par with the pretty town they passed through a little while back. “Am I going to get a hot shower here?”

“Probably not,” Nicky says. “But we can at least eat a meal not in a moving car, hm?”

Nile, for her part, deeply wants out of the car. She’s been awake the whole time, and hasn’t even had the distraction of taking a turn driving, like she would on some of those long road trips she went on with her friends in the past. Friends she’ll never see again, and she firmly squashes that thought.

At the same time, she’s apathetic enough right now to not say anything, to let the others figure it out. 

Andy sighs. “We’re moving again at first light.”

“Of course, Boss,” Joe says, and even Nile can tell his voice is full of fake cheer, but he and Nicky and Andy all get out of the car, so Nile follows suit.

They need supplies, which turns into a contentious little battle of downturned lips and displeased humming and small, aborted hand movements. Andy vetoes them all going as too conspicuous, but patently refuses to not be the one to go, and no one wants Andy to go alone. Nicky and Joe also don’t seem willing to let the other more than an arm’s length away, which Nile supposes is probably fair, considering what they just went through. They’re not clingy, and she hasn’t seen them more than touch hands, but it’s like they’re orbiting each other, and no one wants to throw that off course.

So Andy and Nile end up heading into the main town center, with a hastily scribbled list from Nicky. Nile can’t really decipher his chicken scratch—and she thinks she sees the ghost of a smile on Joe’s face, when he notices her trying—but Andy takes the list without complaint.

“I can drive,” Nile offers.

“Can you drive a manual?”

She has to admit she can’t, even if she still thinks Andy shouldn’t be driving like she is. Still, if she says anything, they’ll be back inside and having the mostly-silent battle of who will go once more, so Nile gets in the passenger’s seat and keeps an eye on Andy.

“Probably good I’m coming,” Nile says eventually. “I at least was mortal recently.” She thinks she remains remarkably steady as she says that. “I remember what wounds need and stuff.”

Andy snorts. “Nicky and Joe are medics,” she says. “They can keep patching me up. Unless you have stuff on your Marine file that B—that we didn’t see.”

Nile flushes, a bit. “No.” Right. Not even useful as the recent mortal. Because of course her Marine training doesn’t have any great hidden depths. Just conditioning to kill people.

Andy looks at her sidelong for a long moment, and Nile starts to get worried about traffic. “That said…you’ll be helpful in the pharmacy.  _ I _ am not a medic, and I don’t know what I’m doing.”

So she talks Andy through what she needs, although it’s not like Nile can read any of the products. They make a bit of an odd couple, Andy reading and scrunching up her brow—apparently her Polish written language skills are a bit dated—and Nile telling her if she needs the thing or not.

She sticks to wound care, mostly, but a part of her mind wonders about other things Andy might need. Like multivitamins. Tampons. Advil for regular aches and pains. 

Then they go food shopping, and Andy reads Nicky’s chicken scratch. Nile has no idea what he hopes to make, but clearly he has some idea. This isn’t someone’s pantry-stocking-whatever run.

So they fill the back of the car with bags and begin the trip home. “Where are we going?” Nile asks about halfway back.

“Away.”

“Andy.”

Andy shrugs. “Sorry, kid. I don’t know what to tell you. I just…away. That’s all we got.”

Nile supposes it’s not like she has somewhere to go  _ to _ , so she has to take it.

Dinner is delicious, which is relatively impressive considering Nicky spends about fifteen minutes half paying attention to it, while he watches Joe tend to Andy’s wound. The table is relatively quiet, with bumping forks and bowls and no conversation.

She doesn’t exactly want to be the first to speak, but her mother raised her with manners. “Thanks for dinner, Nicky.”

He looks up slowly, but the small smile he gives her looks genuine. “My pleasure, Nile.”

“Wait until we get to a house with a real kitchen,” Joe says, the silence seemingly broken. “Nicky makes great food.”

If that were Nile, she’d be decently insulted, thinking Joe means the current meal isn’t any good. But Nicky’s small smile gets just a little bigger, a little more smug, and Nile makes note of it.

She’s never been  _ that _ couple, but she’s known a few of  _ those _ couples. Not that Nicky and Joe necessarily compare—they’ve been together at least ten times what the average human manages—but she gets the gist of it.

So she helps clean up, bringing dishes to the other room to wash them in water that doesn’t run warm, just like Nicky said earlier. Joe dries and Nicky puts everything away. Andy’s disappeared, but the others don’t seem worried so Nile tries not to be either.

Andy reappears just as they’re finishing, hair dripping wet. Joe wrinkles his nose.

Andy throws a towel at him. “How many centuries did you live before modern plumbing?”

“That does not mean I can’t enjoy it.”

“Wimp.”

Joe just hums, not fighting the designation.

Nile is weighing whether or not she wants to take a cold shower—Copley’s place had at least provided them plenty of hot water—when Nicky gently taps her elbow. “Come. It is late, and Andromache will have us up with the birds.”

“You’ll be  _ lucky _ if I wait that long,” she threatens as she sits in one of the wobbly kitchen chairs.

So she lets Nicky steer her towards the only other room beside the bathroom. Joe, as expected, follows along about five feet behind Nicky.

“Do not worry,” Nicky says to her, “not all of our places are like this.”

“Or  _ caves _ ,” Joe says, distaste evident.

Nicky smiles again. “We’ve slept in plenty of caves, my heart.”

“And now we don’t need to.”

The room has two beds, both thin twin mattresses on flimsy cots that will definitely squeak. She knows that Nicky and Joe will manage somehow to contort their not-insignificant frames onto one, but that still leaves only one bed for two other people. 

“Should I sleep on the floor?” It’s only fair, after all. Andy’s mortal, and Nile’s the new kid. She knows how things work.

Joe and Nicky exchange some sort of look over her head. “That bed is…is Booker’s. Andy does not do beds.”

“What do you mean, _doesn’t_ _do beds_?”

Nicky shrugs. “Andy is old, Nile. She’s been a warrior on the move all her long life. She sleeps when and where she can, but rarely will settle down for an entire night.”

Somewhat perturbed, Nile nevertheless settles into bed. Fully clothed, because it’s not like she has any other options and she’s not going down to her panties with other people in the room. Not that Nicky and Joe would be inappropriate about it—they’d both had to help her get her own blood and bone out of her hair and off her skin in the shower the other day—but it’s the principle of the thing.

They also remain fully clothed, even leaving their boots on, and crawl into bed right away. Nile doesn’t know why that surprises her. Some part of her felt almost like she was a kid again, where she’d be put to bed and the adults would go talk in the other room to talk. But that’s not true. She might be young compared to them, but none of them have treated her like a child yet.

She watches them settle, Joe with his back to the wall, Nicky with his back to Joe’s chest. Joe wraps his arms around Nicky, slots a leg in between his, and Nicky settles a handgun beneath his pillow. Nile makes a mental note to be really quiet if she gets up in the night.

“Goodnight, Nile,” Nicky says softly. Joe murmurs his agreement, eyes already drooping.

“Goodnight.” She’s not sure if she can sleep, but within minutes, Joe’s soft breathing lulls her under.

Nile wakes up panting, but she avoids screaming, so only Nicky wakes with her.

She sees his bright eyes through the mostly-dark room, sees him mouth  _ Quynh? _ at her. She shakes her head, then waves him off while she settles her breathing. She gets out of bed and moves to the kitchen, and ignores Nicky’s soft whisper behind her.

Andy is there, still at the kitchen table, completely awake and looking over a map she got from God knows where. If Nile didn’t know better, she’d say the woman was never even injured at all. She certainly doesn’t hold herself like it. “Did you sleep?” she grouches.

Andy sets the map mostly aside. “In the car. Remember?” She seems to be studying Nile. “Is it…”

“No. Not her.” She closes her eyes and rests her hands on the small countertop. She can’t become their portal into their drowning friend. She has her own damn nightmares to cope with.

Nile’s died four times now, been healed just shy of death a half dozen others, and she’s learned some stuff. Like some deaths matter more. Like some are quick enough that you can almost discard them, if you don’t think about it too hard. Andy shooting her in the head or Merrick’s guys shooting her in the chest, she died and by the time she woke up the pain was fading and the wound was gone. It was quick, and her brain almost struggles to see it as real.

But some deaths… 

She feels the jump out the window, knowing she’ll come back but not really  _ knowing _ it yet, not bone deep. She feels the knife in her throat, the desperate gurgle, knowing she’s dying, knowing Dizzy is trying to hold her together as she bleeds out, not even able to say goodbye. 

Her hand travels to her throat. Unmarked, not even a scar to show for it. Just the nightmares.

She opens her eyes to Andy watching her. “It sticks with you, Nile,” she says softly.

Nile takes a ragged breath. “Yeah? You remember yours?”

“No.” It sounds like a lie, Nile can  _ hear  _ it, but doesn’t have the breath or energy to call Andy out on it.

“I’m not going back to sleep,” she says after a moment, hand rubbing her throat again. If it’s not the knife then it’s the window, and if it’s not that then it’s the man she shot, and, if she’s really unlucky, the drowning immortal warrior long past insane in a metal coffin.

Andy kicks out the chair opposite her. “Come show me somewhere you’ve always wanted to go, then.”

Nile musters up the energy to move to the chair, and looks the map over.

Andy wakes Nicky and Joe up well before dawn, and they’re in the car within twenty-five minutes. None of them have toothbrushes, and Andy’s the only one who showered yesterday, so Nile fervently hopes they’re headed somewhere with a few more amenities.

She’d pointed out a dozen places on Andy’s map last night— “Shit, kid, just show me the places you don’t want to go instead, how about that?” —but Andy doesn’t seem to be heading to any particular one.

Instead, they eventually end up in Vienna, which makes Nile grit her teeth, because while she’s no expert, she is positive that the most direct route from London to Vienna does not involve a pit stop in Szczecin, Poland.

Still, after eight hours on the road, Joe leads the way into a hotel suite with two bedrooms. Nicky checked them in, with Joe as usual hovering behind him, and Andy and Nile trying to keep themselves out of the focus of the front desk clerk. 

“Do you all stay in hotels often?”

“Sometimes,” Joe shrugs, waiting for Nicky to finish checking the left bedroom, eyes not leaving his back. “It all depends. We have bolt holes all over the planet, but, despite what Andy says, only a dozen or so are even fit for human habitation.”

“Plus we have money,” Nicky says, returning.

Joe manages a small laugh. “No thanks to you.” He turns to Nile. “Nile, I love this man, I do, but my love is possibly one of the worst with finances I have ever seen. Gambling away all our money.”

Nicky laughs softly and tugs on Joe’s leather jacket. “You’re one to talk. How much was this jacket, again?”

“Well, no one is worse than Andy, anyways,” Joe says instead of answering. 

Nile…can’t quite square that with the calm, in control woman. “Andy’s bad with money?” Andy seems to always have her shit together.

“Andy is older than money like we think of it. It doesn’t mean anything to her.”

“It’s just paper you all have agreed means something,” Andy says, returning from the bathroom. “Meaningless, really.”

Right. Because Nile is now hanging out with people older than she can even imagine. “Right, well, speaking of money…”

Speaking of money, Nile’s account had the bare minimum in it, because most of her military check went home. Even if she could access that account without sending up a thousand red flags, it wouldn’t get her very far.

Joe seems to catch on first. “I don’t have any euros,” he apologizes. “And we don’t like credit cards much, for obvious reasons. But I’ll get you some.”

Which of course means Nicky comes with them. Andy waves them off, settling onto the couch, and Nile wonders if she’s going to catch some sleep while they’re gone.

Joe speaks with the concierge about currency conversion, and walks away with a wallet full of Euros. “Didn’t I catch up to you all in France?”

“We’d only been there a day, and we were staying off the radar. Previously, we were in Morocco,” Joe explains. “Well. Previously we were in Sudan, but that was a job. Nicky and I spent a few days in Morocco before we met Andy and Booker” —he almost doesn’t stumble on the name— “So, therefore, dirhams.” Nile nods at the explanation, and walks out of the hotel. 

“What are you looking for?” Nicky asks her. He stays a step behind them, and Nile doesn’t think she imagines the way Nicky is watching everyone on the streets around them. Joe, for his part, looks almost relaxed, like Nicky has his back and therefore he doesn’t have to think about it. Nile envies him that, a bit.

Nile lists her not-small shopping list—she’s not high maintenance, but she needs a change of clothes or two and a toothbrush and deodorant and maybe a razor, and the hotel provided mini shampoos aren’t going to cut it, assuming they even continue to stay in places with stuff like that—and Joe and Nicky nod, steering her in the correct direction.

“You speak any German?” Joe whispers to her as they enter a store, as if it’s just occurring to him.

“Nein.”

“Well, we’ll do the talking then, I guess. Not that Vienna doesn’t have plenty of tourists, but…”

But it’s better to not stand out at all. Nile gets it, and nods.

Nicky and Joe throw things into her piles—toothbrushes for everyone, and two different types of toothpaste because Nicky apparently doesn’t like mint, deodorants, razors, an electric trimmer for Joe’s beard, clothes for themselves and Andy, and several bags of candy—and Joe pays for it all, while Nicky and Nile try to balance their bags.

“Does Andy need anything for her wound?” Nile asks.

“Not yet. You bought enough yesterday.”

So they go back to the hotel, and when they notice her walking slowly, looking around, they slow their pace to match hers. She knows better than to ask for a tour, not with all of them paranoid to high heaven right now, but she’s been in more countries this past week than her entire prior life. She desperately wants to see.

“Ever travelled before, Nile?”

She swallows. “Not really.” She thinks back to last Christmas, when her and her brother batted around the idea of a trip to California with Mom when she left the service. A sort of dream vacation, maybe. Something they’ll never get now.

“We’ll come back,” Nicky promises softly, and Nile just nods. She apparently has time.

But she’ll never have time with the people she wants to.

Nicky orders room service, considering the suite’s lack of kitchen. He orders enough food for seemingly eight, but they all demolish it. After, Nile takes a shower, not even feeling guilty for how long she takes in the suite’s too-nice bathroom.

It’s not pajamas, but sweatpants and a hoodie are a massive step up in terms of sleeping, so Nile slips them on and joins everyone in the main living area, where she finds them playing cards.

Nile has never heard of the game they’re playing, and it seems to be from the fifteenth century or so. She doesn’t feel quite up for playing poker with immortals, so she suggests bullshit, which they’ve apparently never heard of. She runs through the rules, and they play.

Nicky and Joe can call each other’s bullshit without even  _ looking _ at each other, often before the other even opens their mouth in the first place, and Andy’s not far behind them. But none of them know Nile that well yet, and she finds three immortal warriors staring intensely into her eyes, trying to determine if she’s bullshitting them.

They let her get away with it—their mistake, really, but she’s played this game with her mother and brother a thousand times, and she wins more often than she loses—and she ends up winning for the night.

Andy cackles. “You should have put money on it, Nile, you would have cleaned up.”

“I have no collateral, remember?”

“Doing dishes counts as collateral around here,” Nicky tells her. 

“Bet Nicky once or twice, and you’ll have plenty of money.” Nicky just sighs, and doesn’t dispute Andy’s claim.

“Next time, then.”

“Next time, we will teach  _ you _ some games.”

Joe looks at his watch. “I’m going to bed. Dawn, I assume, Boss?”

“If you’re lucky,” Andy snarks. She doesn’t get up from the table. “Remember, boys. Not too loud.”

“Goodnight, Andy,” Nicky says, perhaps a touch more firmly than Nile would expect. 

Something passes between him and Andy in a long look, and her eyes go soft, a little sad. “Sleep well.”

Joe and Nicky take the room on the left, so Nile takes the room on the right. “You sure you don’t want to sleep?” She asks. “Bed’s definitely big enough for two.”

Andy snorts. “Enjoy it, kid. Can’t promise you’ll get your fancy bed every night.”

Nile can’t help her half smile, but she nods, and goes to bed.

She wakes up with dreams of Quynh, pounding on the coffin, screaming under water. Nile can feel her, feel her anger, feel her rage, feel her pain and her desperation, even as she watches her die and come back. It courses through her, hot and cold, lighting her body up before she feels Quynh’s death yet again.

She wakes up shivering cold, even though she fell asleep under a true mound of blankets, still wearing her hoodie.

The bottom of the ocean is cold, she supposes, rubbing her fists against her eyes.

She shivers, and breathes slowly and evenly, forcing her body to calm. The last thing she wants is anyone to come in.

What can she say to them, anyways?  _ She’s still dying. Still lost it. It still hurts.  _ How many times has Quynh died? Nile estimates she drowned with her six or so times before she woke up. She extrapolates that over centuries, and has to fight back nausea.

_ It sticks with you _ , Andy had told her, and Nile doesn’t think she just means your first death. 

Nile wishes she had her phone. Not to call anyone, but to play some stupid, mindless game. To play some music. Anything. But she’d trashed it after she pulled all her photos to the cloud and printed hardcopy backups. It was too risky to do anything else. And they had been generous with money yesterday, but she doubts these people older than dirt are going to drop a cool eight hundred bucks on a phone for her, not for no real reason.

There’s a TV in the main room, but Andy’s probably out there, and there’s no way that wouldn’t wake Nicky at the very least, if not Joe too.

She groans and flops backwards onto her pillows, hands still balled up against her eyes to block out the world. She tries counting backwards from a hundred, and, miraculously, it helps her back to sleep.

She dreams of the man she shot, only this time, he has her brother’s face.

She’s awake long before Andy’s dawn mandate, but she can’t get the dream out of her mind.

It’s ridiculous, anyways. She’s not going to kill her family.

She’s just never going to see them again.

Andy zig-zags them around for almost a month, taking them all the way around the Black Sea, doubling back at times, and choosing destinations seemingly at random, ignoring Joe’s and Nicky’s requests that she go somewhere with modern conveniences so she can heal. They do end up in caves a time or two. 

Which means they see her nightmares. There’s no hiding them, not in caves or one room apartments and cabins and huts. Andy never seems to sleep at night, and is always awake when Nile’s nightmares end. Nicky wakes up every time, and if Nile startles Nicky enough, Joe will wake too.

It should maybe be embarrassing, to have the whole group in on her nightmares. But no one treats her like it’s a weakness, or like she’s the kid. Even though she doesn’t see them have nightmares—which they  _ should _ , Joe and Nicky were just tortured, Andy is facing mortality for the first time in thousands of years, they were betrayed by their brother of two hundred years—she knows they don’t see hers as a mark against her.

Nicky follows her out of the mouth of the cave instead of Andy, this time. She stares up at the moon, trying to get her bearings, and he waits for her for a few minutes.

“My throat, tonight,” she says softly. Nicky makes a soft humming noise, and she remembers that he would have witnessed that moment through the dreams, just like she witnesses Quynh’s deaths.

It’s not the coming back that gets to her, although she imagines that’s part of it, since humans  _ aren’t meant to do that _ . It’s not the look in Dizzy’s eyes, or the pain, although those featured prominently in her early nightmares. 

She killed a man, and he killed her, and she can’t really fault him for that. She doesn’t fault herself for her choice much, either, not anymore. If it could even be considered a choice, when instinct is beaten into you like that.

No, she doesn’t blame either of them. Not for the choice they made in that exact moment. She wonders sometimes how she got there, though. Did God or the universe or destiny or whatever see her in that moment and choose to give her this eternity? Was she always marked for it?

Why her? She isn’t anyone special. She didn’t make the calls, she showed up and did her part, like thousands of others. And that part probably wasn’t  _ good _ , but she was one piece in a tiny machine.

She doesn’t want Andy’s or Booker’s bitter cynicism, and she knows the good they can do exists in ways different than who she did or didn’t kill. But she can’t help but think that the choices that led to that exact encounter were placed decades and decades—a century, really, maybe longer—before Nile’s small moment, her small choice. And if destiny drove all of that just to get her here, then it’s pretty shitty all around.

“How’d you first die?” Nile asks Nicky. “I know it was Joe, but—”

He shakes his head, the moonlight creating strange shadows on his face. “You don’t want to hear this story.”

“But—”

“Not right now. Ask me any other time. But not right now.” He must see the stubborn set of her jaw, because he tilts his head slightly. “I will tell you, Nile. It is not a secret. We do not keep such secrets from you, and I certainly won’t. Not about this. It is a conversation we will have, if you want. But not tonight. Not when you’re already working through your nightmares.”

Nile sighs and nods, and Nicky puts a hand on her shoulder. “Does it ever stop?”

Nicky considers for a moment. “You make new memories,” he offers. “The good outweighs the bad.”

“But there’s always bad.”

“And sometimes new bad. But there is always good, too.” His hand momentarily tightens on her shoulder. “We have not shown you enough good.”

Nile leans her head back to look at the moon again. “Tell me something good.”

Nicky disappears with Andy during what passes as breakfast the next morning to tend to Andy’s wound. Joe, sporting some truly epic bedhead and a well-past-overgrown beard, tells her a story about Michelangelo. She’s still trying to figure out if he’s bullshitting her when Andy and Nicky come back.

Nicky returns to Joe’s side, as if drawn in like a magnet. Andy sits closer to Nile than she usually would, and grabs a power bar for herself.

“No more of this,” she says, eating with small, precise bites. “No more looking over our shoulders. Let’s go away.”


	2. Chapter Two

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Healing is small steps, in fits and starts.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hello all! Welcome to chapter two.
> 
> Everyone's a little fucked up here, but not disturbingly/excessively so.
> 
> Warnings for general trauma (Nile is...going through it). Nile is having trouble adjusting, including nightmares. She's also starting to deal with the military industrial complex and unjust war that brought her here, but she definitely doesn't fully process that.
> 
> Andy brings up Achilles, so we get that comic backstory even if I vague it a bit because it doesn't make a whole ton of sense in the comics. Andy talks about her first death, and Nile definitely thinks about how traumatic their lives are.
> 
> And Nile unlocks Nicky's tragic backstory, which is also mostly relatively vague, but the Crusades were awful and terrible and Nicky expresses some lingering trauma when she asks.
> 
> I think I make this sound way more serious than it actually is, but it's safe to say trauma is going around.

_ Away _ means three separate planes to Australia. Nile’s never been to Australia, doesn’t know much about the place other than kangaroos and the crocodile hunter, but she’s game. They even speak English there, which will be a bonus for her. She’s willing to learn the many languages Andy and Nicky and Joe switch between so easily—well, the modern ones, anyways—but it won’t happen overnight.

It becomes clear within a day that everyone is a little calmer. Andy was right; they were looking over their shoulders. Now, she sees them all relax just slightly.

They have a house about an hour outside Melbourne. It’s dusty but modern enough. At the very least, there’s air conditioning and running water and a full kitchen. There are even multiple bedrooms.

Now that they’re settled, the very first thing Joe does is talk her through the finances and documents. “I don’t know how to make them,” he apologizes to her. “That was…well, that was Booker’s thing. Once a forger…I imagine that’s what we have Copley for, now.”

Nevertheless, he has a Canadian passport for her and an Australian visa in case she needs it and gives her details for a bank account with five thousand Australian dollars in it. “We can get you more,” he assures her. “When I’m done with this,  _ you _ can get you more. But five thousand dollars won’t set off any alarms, when you’re visiting on a student visa.”

Even with five thousand dollars, a phone seems like an exorbitant waste. They all rotate burner phones anyways, and she thinks she’d physically lose it if she saw Andy crush an iPhone underfoot as casually as she crushes any cheap burner. Still, she buys herself an mp3 player, and a Spotify account under her new name.

So Joe teaches her the money. Andy runs through as many safe houses, caves, and bolt holes as she can physically remember— “Not that you’ll need this one, but I did leave a really nice sword there, maybe three hundred years ago? I wonder if it’s still there” —and Nile will admit too many of them slip her mind. Still, she supposes she has time.

Nicky takes to throwing knives with her when she can’t sleep. Even with separate bedrooms, even with her being as quiet as possible, he seems to always know at which point her nightmares wake her, and waits for her in the hallway. 

She doesn’t choose to get up every night, and she does half wonder if Nicky waits in the hallway until he’s sure she went back to sleep, before going back to sleep himself.

“Doesn’t Joe mind this?” She asks one night, him correcting her form once more.

“Hm?”

“Doesn’t Joe mind you leaving him alone in bed?”

Nicky manages a small smile. “We are not actually joined at the hip, him and I.”

While that’s undoubtedly true, Nile’s not blind. She sees the increasing bags under Nicky’s eyes from sleepless nights, and she sees Joe’s tired eyes come morning. Nicky is staying awake because she wakes him, and Joe is not sleeping well without Nicky.

They might not be joined at the hip, but they orbit each other so tightly it’s a wonder they don’t run into each other on a constant basis. They barely touch. They certainly don’t make out on the couch or delay everyone by having sex in the shower or anything, like some couples Nile has known. But they’re clearly in each other’s space all the time, and only calm when it is that way.

They weren’t like that in Goussainville. They didn’t touch until bedtime at Goussainville. They orbited each other, yes, enough that even Nile noticed, but it was a wider orbit. Planets passing and existing comfortably together, maybe.

Nile’s known them longer like this than she did any other way. Maybe Goussainville should be considered the fluke. But based on the tension that hasn’t dissipated and Andy’s long looks, Nile doesn’t think so.

She just hums, though. Nicky is a grown man, and she’s told him a dozen times he doesn’t have to stay up with her, which he always waves off by reminding her she’s family.

Nicky throws next, and he lands a perfect bullseye on their makeshift target without really even looking. Nile grumbles, and he laughs. “Practice.”

Staying awake half the night to practice knife throwing seems a far better frame of mind than staying awake half the night because she misses her family or remembers her own gruesome deaths or ruminates on the reality of the US occupation of Afghanistan or feels the pain of a drowning woman, so she takes the challenge.

When dawn begins to break, Nicky nudges her. “Come on. Breakfast?”

She nods, so they sneak back in, tiptoeing past Andy sleeping in the overstuffed living room chair even though there’s an entire bedroom for her here. She opens her eyes just enough to process them passing, and then closes them again, and doesn’t get up until coffee is done.

Andy must see how worn down Joe and Nicky are, because Nile comes back from a run the next morning and walks straight into an argument.

“Just take some damn time, you know you need it—”

“Now is not the time—”

“Now is  _ exactly _ the time, before you lose it—”

“Not with you. Not with  _ Nile _ , like this.”

Nile steps into the room. “You ever heard the expression, put on your own oxygen mask first?”

Joe and Nicky turn to her, seemingly caught off guard by her arrival, which frankly probably supports Andy’s point. “Yes?”

“You can’t be here for us if you don’t take care of you first.”

Andy gestures expansively. “Exactly. She gets it.  _ Go _ .”

They do go. Joe talks Nile through checking Andy’s mostly-healed but not gone (despite what Andy says) wound, and then they pack. They go as far as New Zealand— “Far enough they won’t be tempted to come back early, close enough they could if they needed to” Andy surmises—and say it will be no more than two weeks, although Andy tells them to take a month— “Or a year, I’m not going to croak in a year.”

The house feels different without them, to say the least. She knows they’ve been off, but they’ve also been essentially the only Joe and Nicky she’s ever known, and every bit they’ve been able to give her has filled the space around her. 

“What do they need?” She asks Andy the first night at dinner, which Nile made because apparently Andy still has a very hunter/gatherer mindset if you ask her to cook for herself, and either scavenges protein bars or hunts meat to cook on an open flame.

“Time. Time to focus on themselves first. Where they can just…work it all out. Between getting taken and tortured and  _ me _ and what Booker said and did…it’s a lot. They’ve been…” She seems to struggle with words. “They need the space where they can process it. Without having to perform for us.” Something dark crosses her eyes, and Nile guesses she doesn’t so much like the idea that Nicky and Joe feel like they have to perform for them.

“They know that we—” What does she want to say? Love them? Care for them? Will support them? “Don’t care, right? That we want to help them?”

“Of course. But Booker implied that their constant love possibly drove him to do what he did, even if he didn’t mean it that way. He didn’t,” she says almost defensively, and then sighs. “It doesn’t change that he said it. They need to decide to be truly comfortable around us again. And they’ll think it’s selfish to process the reminder they can die in front of  _ me _ . And, well…” She shrugs. “They were tortured. In front of each other. They don’t need an audience, dealing with that.”

“Is there anything we can do for them?”

“Be here when they come back,” she says, and her eyes go distant, so Nile just nods and clears the table.

When she tries to sneak outside in the middle of the night—it’s strange, without Nicky waiting in the hallway, but outside still seems like the safest place to be—Andy follows her.

She watches Nile throw the knives Nicky had given to her for a few minutes, before she huffs and finds her Labrys. “Let me show you,” she says softly, not breaking the quiet of the night, and Nile nods, accepting.

The next morning, Nile comes back from her run to find Andy asleep at the kitchen table. Nile comes in for water, and Andy pokes her head up just enough to determine it’s really Nile, before she falls back asleep while Nile makes breakfast, only waking up to eat.

Andy teaches her to drive stick, teaches her to wield her Labrys and promises a sword later, when they have one again, and begins teaching her Russian, even if they don’t get very far.

And one day, she takes Nile on a twelve hour road trip that Nile is half-worried their piece of shit car won’t hold up to, not in the hot Australian sun.

Nile half-hopes for a trip to kangaroos or the Sydney Opera House or Uluru or all the way up the coast to the Reef, or literally any culturally significant landmark, but instead they end up definitely on someone’s private land. Andy drives to what looks like a decrepit homestead in the way back.

“I lived here, once,” she says after a few minutes. She pauses. “With my husband. Achilles.”

Nile looks at her. “I didn’t know—”

“I stayed for thirty years,” she interrupts, eyes closed. “I didn’t age. He did.”

“I’m sorry.”

Andy takes a deep, shaky breath. “You know? I really was too. Then. But now…” She shakes her head. “I’m happy for the time we got.”

Nile doesn’t know what to say to that, just stares at the dilapidated homestead. Andy’s home, her seemingly happy home she made with a mortal man, knowing full well what would happen probably.

“I don’t regret it,” Andy continues. 

When Andy seems disinclined to move, Nile steps a little closer to her. “Why am I here?” She asks.

“The boys—they know about Achilles. But I’ve never shown anyone this. I don’t talk about him much.” She takes a ragged little breath. “I’m probably the last person to remember him. We didn’t exactly have children, and his family…If he knew where they were, which I doubt, he didn’t pass that on to me. And I just…I wanted someone to know the story.”

Nile feels a knot in her throat, and nods. 

She wants to stay in this moment for Andy, she  _ does _ , but she can’t help but wonder if she’ll be standing outside her childhood home in Chicago one day, with someone else—maybe Nicky and Joe, or Booker, or a new immortal hundreds of years down the road—for the same reason Andy brought her here today.

They drive back the same night, and Andy sleeps throughout Nile’s entire turn, despite the fact that Nile makes good use of the aux cord. 

Nile keeps her hands perfect on the wheel, ten and two, and drives through the long night, heading back to Victoria.

They’ll drive twenty-four hours, almost, just to sit around and look at a ruined house for two hours. But it’s worth it, absolutely worth it.

Nile thinks of a history teacher she once had, a pretty cool guy, who often reminded them that history was written by the winners, and they should interrogate what that means. History is the active choice of who gets remembered and who gets forgotten, and Nile thinks she managed to see all of that in Andy’s eyes today. Andy, the last woman on Earth who remembers Achilles, left only by a miracle or divine intervention or destiny or luck or what have you, trying to ensure his memory survives at least a few more years. 

Andy, who has lost at least two great loves in her long life, one to the sea and the other to time. Andy, who Nile still doesn’t know exactly how old she is, who has walked this Earth for too long, confronting the stories she remembers. What time leaves behind.

Nile swallows. It’s hard not to see how that could be her one day, even if she can’t really process being that old. 

She turns her music up. Andy grunts softly, but continues to sleep next to her.

Two days later, Nile goes downstairs in the middle of the night, ready to go be outside for a while. She doesn’t see Andy in any of her usual spots—the armchair, the kitchen table, over at the desk—but she doesn’t stop to consider it, just keeps moving. 

She almost trips over Andy once she’s outside, who is apparently sleeping on the porch. “What the fuck?” She hisses.

Andy stretches and blinks up at her. “What? We end up here every night anyways.”

“There are beds inside!” 

“Beds,” Andy scoffs. “We slept under the stars for thousands of years before your stupid beds, Nile.” She bounds to her feet, looking completely awake now. “Come on. Hand axes tonight.”

So they end up throwing handaxes, and Nile doesn’t even know when Andy acquired them, but she is a master with them. Nile for her part is figuring it out, but she gets better quickly, using the skills from Nicky’s knife throwing tutorials.

“It was Quynh, again,” Nile says after a little while. Andy flinches, but Nile continues on. “I…I keep seeing her, and…”

Andy’s breath is ragged for just a moment. “She deserves better than this.” She retrieves her axe. “See, this is why, you all believe in some big guy upstairs. But if there was someone watching over us…no one would be cruel enough, to let this continue. They’d let her die.”

“Maybe there’s a reason.”

Andy throws the axe again. “Shit reason.”

Nile can’t exactly disagree, and takes her own turn. Close, but not close enough yet. “What’s the worst way you’ve ever died?” She doesn’t mean it to slip out, but can’t help it. Thinking of the eternal drowning makes her think of what horrors she might face in her own future.

The knife, the fall…those were bad. Probably not worse than watching Booker’s guts spill out of him, or seeing the damage of brains and blood and bone on the back of Nicky’s head as they drove away from Merrick’s, though. She needs to contextualize what’s coming.

Andy goes very, very still. “I’ve died more times than anyone can count.”

“That’s not an answer.”

She shrugs, and comes to life enough to throw her second axe. “I’ve stepped on grenades, Nile. I’ve been hanged and I’ve been burned and I had my head removed, once. I’ve drowned  _ hundreds _ of times. I’ve frozen and starved and I died of the fucking Bubonic Plague. They’re all awful, Nile.”

Nile retrieves their axes, this time, but doesn’t let Andy off the hook. “That’s still not an answer.”

Andy takes the axe straight from her and flings it without looking. Still a perfect bullseye. “The woman who took me in, when I was a child. Who trained me, kept me safe. I became too strong a warrior. I threatened her power and she killed me for it.”

Her first death. Nile sucks in a sharp breath. “Guess it never really leaves you, huh?”

Andy holds absolutely still for a moment, then shakes her head. “No. It’ll never leave you, Nile.” She throws her second axe. “But you know what? She died in that battle and I somehow got back up, and then…the worst part is figuring out how to live with that.”

Nile feels that deep in her soul. Whatever else happened in Afghanistan, at Merrick’s tower, however she felt about being there, about who she faced, they died and she walked away. And she doesn’t know why. Maybe never will. “How do you live with that?”

Andy shrugs. “Sometimes, you throw axes in the middle of the night. Sometimes you sleep under the stars. Sometimes you get answers, like what Copley told us. Sometimes…it just hurts, Nile. And we live a long, long time. Our hurts hurt longer.”

She doesn’t move to retrieve the axe and neither does Nile. Andy tilts her head back and looks up at the night sky. “Tell you one thing, though. Whatever you do, whatever you do it with…we’re not meant to do it alone. This  _ family _ is what allows me to live with it.”

Nile runs her heart out once dawn comes, the world  _ family _ echoing and turning over in her head and physically chasing her down the street as she tries and fails to grapple with it.

Then she comes back and showers and eats three eggs with cheese, then passes out on the couch.

And when she wakes, hours later, her head somehow having made it into Andy’s lap, she hasn’t had a single dream.

After dinner, Andy pulls out the deck of cards once more, shuffling too fast for Nile to track, with a shark-like grin on her face. “What do you say we make it interesting?”

Nile snorts. “You know what? Sure. I win and you owe me a hundred dollars. You win and I do our laundry for the rest of the time here without complaint.” She sits at the table. “But I get to choose the game.”

“Fair deal.”

Bullshit isn’t going to work—either you have the cards, or I have the cards, but the fun is taken out with two people—so Nile talks through the rules of spit and deals them up.

Even struggling with the rules the first few rounds, Andy has the fastest reflexes Nile has ever seen, and Nile concedes defeat and promises to drive to the laundromat the next day.

Nile cries in the laundromat a bit.

She just…it’s the first time she’s really been alone in a while and she sees the people moving around her, having absolutely normal lives, and she nearly loses it.

It’s okay. She gets herself back under control, gets the laundry done.

Andy doesn’t have to know.

Joe and Nicky take three weeks to come back, a happy medium between their promised two weeks and Andy’s month. They roll up in a new car—that looks older than Nile, but new to them, at least—and easy smiles.

Joe and Nicky each hug her, hard. Nicky cradles her head in his hand and Joe lifts her off the ground in his enthusiasm. “Thank you,” Nicky whispers softly to her. 

“I didn’t do anything.”

“Our own oxygen masks first, hm? Sometimes, we forget.”

She just smiles at them, and volunteers to grab one of their bags. Joe and Nicky hold hands into the house, but then Nicky moves to take their bags into the bedroom while Joe continues his conversation with Andy.

Nicky emerges from the bedroom and moves to the kitchen, then moans about the state of it. Joe laughs and promises to rectify it, and then drags Nile into the car and off to the grocery store, but not before he pecks Nicky goodbye.

“So, things are better?” Nile asks. She winces. “Not that you need to tell me anything, just—”

“Yes,” Joe interrupts her. “Things are much better now, Nile. Thank you for having patience.”

“Of course. I…I’m glad you’re okay.”

“Mm, me too. You know, this is the first time we’ve been apart since…before Sudan, probably. I’m sure you noticed, we were clingy. But now I can go to the store with you, and Nicky can stay with Andy, and we do not worry. He trusts I will come back, and I trust he will be there.” He gets a soft smile on his face. “It’s much better, now. We needed time.”

“I’m glad you’re better,” Nile says softly.

Joe hums in agreement. “You’re next, probably.”

He pulls into the parking lot. “Next for what?”

“That probably depends on you. Unless you’ve been more busy that I imagined while we were gone, I imagine leaving to have sex in New Zealand for a few weeks isn’t quite what you need.”

Nile does  _ not _ blush at that. “I mean, I wouldn’t say  _ no _ , exactly, but…you’re right.”

Joe chuckles and opens his side door. “We’ll figure it out. Now, let’s get the food to keep Nicky happy, hm?”

“So, that’s what it was? A sex vacation?” She manages to ask on the ride home, the trunk full of more bags of food than she could imagine them needing. 

Joe outright laughs. “More or less, maybe. Among other things.” He drums his thumb against the wheel. “Our world changed a lot, Nile. Some for the better—” He nudges her “ —but most of it decidedly for the worst. Andy, and Booker, and Merrick’s lab…it was a lot. It is nice to know, maybe, some things don’t change.”

“You’ve really been together for a thousand years?”

Joe hums. “I met him in what you call 1099, so not quite, but getting close now. Nicolò was not the man you know now yet. I wasn’t either, of course, people change and grow, but…what Nicky and I had, it took many years.”

“How many?”

“I realized I loved him sometime around 1150.” He’s looking at the road, but she can see the softness in his eyes.

“So, a whole lifetime.”

“Mm, especially then. But it took us ten more years to do anything about it. Things change, of course. We’ve grown, and the world changed. But from that point—maybe before, I don’t know—we were Nicolò and Yusuf, Nicholas and Joseph, Nicky and Joe, whatever names we were using. One unit.”

Nile smiles slightly, and settles back deeper into her seat. “That’s nice.”

The smile Joe gives her is practically blinding. “Yes. It is,” he agrees, and then he makes the last turn to get back to the house, and the conversation comes to an end.

Nicky’s dinner is far better than what Nile had been putting together. She watches him cook but he turns down her help multiple times. Joe just shrugs at her, and takes the seat across from her to watch Nicky work.

Andy is sprawled across the couch, well within their view, and her eyes are closed even if Nile doesn’t think she’s really asleep.

“So, Nile, what sightseeing have you done?”

Nile bites her lip, relatively sure she maybe shouldn’t bring up the cross-country roadtrip to see Achilles’ and Andy’s abandoned home. “Not much.”

Nicky raises an eyebrow. “Well. Find some places. We’ll change that.”

Nile makes plans to go see Uluru, and even goes to bed early so she’ll be well rested for the long drive. But of course she’s up in the middle of the night again.

Her mind has gotten out of the habit of looking for Nicky when she leaves her room, so she almost screams when she realizes she’s being watched. But it’s just him, wearing sweatpants and a shirt that’s way too big, probably Joe’s.

She raises an eyebrow. “You should go back to bed.”

He ignores her, and leads the way downstairs. “I have my own nightmares, you know,” he says, once they’re outside.

“But not tonight.”

“You don’t know that.”

She doesn’t, really, it’s true, but she does at the same time. “Were you having nightmares before your trip? Is that why you were always up with me?”

“Some nights. I am also a light sleeper.” He surveys the targets they set up. “What on Earth have you been doing to these?”

“Handaxes.”

“Ah. Are you any good?”

“Getting better. Not as good as Andy.”  
“No one is.” He pulls out his throwing knives and offers some to Nile. “You’re talented enough with these. We should get you some.”

“What keeps you up at night?” She asks.

Nicky’s lips thin. “I told you once, I would tell you the story, if you asked again. Do you want to hear it tonight? When you’re having your own nightmares?”

“I’m always having nightmares,” she points out. “So timing isn’t really the issue. Do you not want to tell me?”

His smile is still too thin. “No, of course I don’t, but that’s not the concern. You’re part of this family, I don’t want to tell you horrible things. And yet you deserve to know.” He closes his eyes. “In 1096, the call to war reached my home. A Holy War. A war to protect Christians in the Holy Land, to defend them and to defend Christ. I was…shall we say dissatisfied?...with my life in the church, but up until then, that had been my best option. So when a new option came, an option that allowed me to feel  _ proud _ of something, perhaps for the first time, I marched. We marched for three years, Nile. Men died left and right. There was often no food. People did unspeakable things, some of which I’m sure you can find in history books, all of which I will tell you if you ask, but you must be sure you want to know. I almost died outside Antioch a half dozen times, and I half wonder sometimes what would have happened then, if I would have woken up. Almost entire cities were slaughtered. And moving forward was the only option. The ends would justify the means, we had all been told. God said so.”

Nile holds very, very still, scared of disturbing his story. Scared of hearing more, too, if she’s fully honest.

“Yusuf killed me outside the gates of Jerusalem. He caught me in my throat. And I thought that it was finally my time, that I had served God, and to fully serve him I would take down one more before I died. So I stabbed Yusuf with the very last of my strength, and died gurgling on my own blood, crushed under him, and I more than deserved it.”

There are…a lot of questions Nile could ask about that. Like what comes next, or how things possibly got better. How Joe forgave Nicky. But that seems like too much, and maybe things she doesn’t want to know. “You dream of that?”

“Sometimes,” he says. “I dream of many things, Nile. I’ve had many years to accumulate new nightmares. But sometimes, yes. Sometimes I dream of that, and when I wake up from my first death in the dream, Joe is still on top of me and doesn’t wake. Sometimes I shove him off and go back to doing what I was doing.” 

Yikes. Nile doesn’t know what to say from there, really.

Nicky shrugs. “But we both woke. And we killed each other again. I was convinced God gave me another chance, to finish Yusuf. The rest of the battle fell away, Christian and Muslim soldiers dead around us and far beneath my notice.” His lips go very thin again. “I don’t know how many times we killed each other, but I do know that when he finally walked away from me, refusing to continue our nightmare, when I finally calmed down, it was far too late for me to do anything in the battle either way. And then I thought I was in hell. Many of those memories appear in my nightmares too.”

He must see her face, because he manages a smile that looks more sad than anything. “I’m sorry to tell you, Nile, but we did not get here necessarily by being good people, with one exception” —Joe, of course he means Joe, the light of his life and perhaps, hearing this story, the moral center of Nicky’s universe— “I cannot tell you why we’re here. Perhaps it is destiny, like I hope. But it did not pick us because we were good people then. We just…had the potential to become better.” He looks up. “You and I, in our unjust wars. And Andy…” He shakes his head. “I don’t know all of Andy’s past, but I know Andy is far older than the word  _ war crime _ . The standards they lived by would never be accepted today.” He curls his mouth into something sardonic and self-deprecating. “Of course, we would have assumed they were unacceptable by my time, and yet, we know that was not true.”

She sits, then, in the dusty backyard. “None of you sell this immortal thing very well.”

Nicky manages a laugh as he sits beside her, although his eyes are still dark. “We have not given you a very good start, I know.”

“How can any of this be good?”

Nicky hums. “I don’t remember dreaming tonight, but last night, I dreamed of the first time we took Andy to the cinema. She’d been insisting they were a passing fad, not worth getting to know. But Yusuf is an artist and saw potential in film, so we’d been attending for years. We saw all those silent films, the very first ones. Then they called them  _ talkies _ , in your America, and Andy likes oral storytelling so much. So we took her.”

Nile can’t help her smile. “How’d she like it?”

“She loved it. My point is, there are good dreams too.”

“I haven’t had good dreams since this all started.”

“There’s still time.”


	3. Chapter Three

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> They have a job to do.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Posting this on my lunch break, aahhhhh.
> 
> Alright, welcome back to chapter three!
> 
> Warnings for their job, which means violence (although honestly it's probably below canon level). The job also has to do with human trafficking.
> 
> Nile has nightmares about Quynh, which she starts exploring more deeply. It also leads to a very brief panic attack.
> 
> Andy is being a bit reckless, frustrated with immortality. This is brief, and she's fine.
> 
> Enjoy, and please let me know what you think!

They make it to Uluru, even if Nile makes them stop for coffee twice on the way. Nicky certainly doesn’t complain.

Nile listens to the tour while Joe, Nicky, and Andy take it on themselves to shame the people still trying to climb Uluru. Nile pays absolute attention to the information she gets—the history and cultural background are rich and important—but she can’t help it when her eyes drift to her little family.

Nicky is once again wearing a t-shirt that fits fine in the shoulders but is a little loose around the chest, and she’s gathered he and Joe don’t seem to separate their clothes, instead going for a more “what’s mine is yours” approach. Joe’s shirt at least fits, mostly, but he’s wearing a backward baseball cap with a tuft of curls sticking out the front. Andy looks as mission ready as she ever does, with a black tank top and her arm bands perfectly in place. She seems to basically own a half dozen identical tank tops and little else, and usually Nile would roll her eyes, but she has to give Andy props for sticking to something she knows works. 

Joe insists on a kitschy tourist picture. Nile has to take his phone so she can get the selfie, because selfies are apparently beyond people almost a thousand years old or older, and Andy grumbles about it the whole time. Joe promises to delete it later, just as soon as he can commit it to a sketchbook, so Andy lets them do it.

They end up in a hostel for the night, and the four of them get a bedroom together. Somehow, Andy glares the front desk clerk into finding one unfilled four bed room. There are two bunks, and Nicky and Joe claim the bottom bunk on the left, so Nicky can face the door. Nile chooses the other bottom bunk, and Andy perches on the top bunk like she’s going to pounce on them when they least expect it.

She expects to drive back to Victoria, but Nicky just hands her a map and a guidebook when Joe and Andy go to find breakfast, and tells her to make a list.

So they pop around the country, staying in Air Bnbs, hotels, hostels, and camp sites. Nile sees Sydney and the Blue Mountains, the Great Barrier Reef and kangaroos and koalas. She sees Tasmania and Perth, and they don’t circle back to Victoria until she wants to see the penguin parade. 

Nile’s never been a tourist anywhere before, except a trip to New York and a trip to Florida, once. Every day is something new to discover, and she’s pleased to see that she’s probably not the only one having the time of her life. Joe debates kidnapping a penguin— “He is soft for cute animals,” Nicky stage whispers to her, like she wouldn’t be able to tell on her own—and they laugh their way through an entire continent. 

Nile rarely dreams of anything other than the recurring dreams of Quynh. Once, she dreams of Joe with a little penguin following him around.

But she does still dream of Quynh, unable to escape the nightmares until whenever—if ever—they meet. She wakes up in a room to herself in a hotel shivering again, and gropes around to dig the fancy hotel stationary and pen out of the bedside drawer, and writes down every detail she can remember. 

Cold. So, so cold. Bone-chilling, bone-rattling cold that’s still seeped into her. A tiny little bit of light coming through, more of a blur in the water than anything. She describes the fish she can see, describes the condition of the horrific coffin as best she can judge.

Then she mercilessly preys on Joe’s love for buying new notebooks, of which he’ll use maybe one in five. Nicky is more than happy to give one of the notebooks piling up away to her, and she transfers her notes carefully and now has plenty of space to add more.

She keeps it by her bedside when she sleeps, and in her bag when they’re on the road, always close at hand.

Their first night back at the house, Andy sleeps outside again. Nicky and Joe shrug, grab blankets and pillows, and join her, so Nile joins in too, and they make a night of it.

“Is this safe?” Nile asks, because she hasn’t seen too many terrifying animals yet, but she knows Australia is known for them, and she can only imagine what comes out at night.

Andy snorts. “You’ll survive whatever it is, Nile.”

_ Yes, but you won’t _ remains firmly unsaid, but she does notice how Andy is worked into the middle of their pile.

“We survive, but it is unpleasant. Remember the crocodile, Nicolò?”

Nicky shivers. “Vividly. Or that bear, in Canada, hm?”

She could ask about these clearly horrific stories, but she would like to sleep tonight. “I’m supposed to be from Canada,” she murmurs. “Never been.”

Joe laughs. “We have time. We could go there next?”

Nile does the math in her head. “It’s going to be winter there soon. No thanks.”

“That means it’ll be summer here. Trust me, you’ll want to move on,” Nicky advises.

Andy  _ harrumphs _ . “Wimps, all of you.”

“Forgive us for not wanting frostbite. Or heat stroke,” Joe says. He turns so he’s spooning Nicky, his back to Andy and Nicky facing outward. “We’ll find somewhere suitable to take you, Nile.”

“Mm,” Nicky agrees, and sleep is creeping into his voice. “You have the whole world, Nile. Think on it.”

She doesn’t get to choose, though, because Copley calls Andy’s phone. Since they’re all sitting around together, and since no one else alive should have Andy’s number, she’s tense as she answers.

Nile doesn’t get much of the picture from Andy’s short answers on the phone, but she does know she’s agreed to whatever it is by the time the call is over.

“Okay,” Andy sighs, rolling her neck. “Wheels up in two hours.”

“Where are we going?”

“Freaking Los Angeles.”

America. The closest Nile’s been to home since she last deployed. Even all the way on the West Coast is closer than she expected to be for a while.

“What’s in Los Angeles?” Nicky asks.

“Human trafficking.”

Nile looks around to grim expressions, and remembers the Copley’s wall of crazy. It’s not all mad scientists out to get them. Most days, they deal with very real problems.

Joe turns to her. “Nile. Will you come with us?”

“This is what you do, right?”

“It doesn’t have to be what you do,” Andy says. “Your way out isn’t gone forever just because you came back to save our asses.”

Nile takes a deep breath and closes her eyes. Remembers Copley’s wall, remembers the ripple effect through generations. Each life they save means more people, means more futures. Means more people saved. And so on.

“Human trafficking?”

Andy nods. “Yeah.”

Nile nods. “Yeah. I can…I can work with that.” So she nods again, and packs her stuff.

Possibly in deference to Andy’s humanity, the plane seems at least unlikely to fall directly out of the sky, but that’s about all it has going for it. There aren’t even real seats.

But they make it, and Nile checks them all into the hotel. It’s another nice room—Copley booked it, apparently, and Nile has to give him points for style—but Andy barely lets them put their bags down before getting to work.

“Nile, set up the tablet,” she instructs, handing her a tablet and an HDMI cord as if they might bite her. It’s not that Andy  _ can’t _ do technology, it’s just that she doesn’t like to, but Nile thinks that honestly, for a several thousand year old woman, she’s impressed Andy just knows the pieces she needs.

“Right. So. This is the target,” she says, pointing to the screen. “Plan is simple. Nicky, take today to get yourself a rifle.”

“Of course, Boss.”

“Joe, Nile, you’ll be releasing the women, getting them out safely. Copley has arranged for aid workers to meet us. I will be with Nicky. As his  _ spotter _ .” She says the words with so much distaste Nile worries her face will get stuck like that.

Nicky, for his part, doesn’t so much as twitch, except for the tiniest little upturn of the left corner of his mouth. “Careful, Boss,” he says. “Or I will think you do not like me.”

She huffs. “Just shoot our targets, and I’ll like you fine.”

“I can do that.” Nicky’s already grabbing his jacket. “And I will be back later. Any requests?”

“Bring back bagels,” Joe says, smiling slightly and reclining back into the couch.

Nicky snorts. “I meant weapons, my love. And besides, Yusuf. Bagels are the East coast.”

Joe waves his hand in an  _ eh _ gesture. “You’ll figure out the weapons, and the bagels.”

Nicky chuckles softly, and leaves.

He returns with bagels, and a duffle bag filled with guns, and a sniper rifle, and he does all of it in less than three hours.

“How…”

Nicky flashes her a small smile. “You pick up tricks, Nile, after so many years.”

Joe hums in agreement, already eating a bagel. “You know those aren’t even technically American,” she points out.

“So little is. If I want a bagel when I come to America, then I will get a bagel. It’s the little things that make this long life worth it.” Nicky raises an eyebrow but otherwise does not stop his unpacking of their newly acquired weapons, but Joe must see it anyways. “Little things and loved ones, that is.”

Nile can’t help but laugh slightly, a fast exhale. “Alright, I get it.”

Nicky is checking over his rifle, and somehow Nile can’t get over the sight of this man with a genuine sniper rifle in their too-nice hotel room. Even though he throws knives with her in the middle of the night with stunning accuracy, even though she’s seen him kill and covered in blood, the sight is jarring.

Nicky smirks slightly, like he can read her mind. “Perhaps we have gone soft, Joe,” he muses. “It has been a long time.”

“It’s been four months,” Joe counters, finishing off his bagel. “I think we’ll be ready.” To prove it, he picks up the gun he apparently has decided will be his.

“Nile, come pick.”

She does, and Joe nods in approval. “With any luck, we won’t even need them. Nicky will take care of the problem, and we’ll just be there to unlock doors and show the way.”

Nile nods, clears her throat. “You guys may be ready…but what about me?”

“Backing out?” Joe asks. There’s no judgement in his voice.

“No. But shouldn’t you…train me, or something?” She’s been with them four months, and it’s been more like some combination of vacation and new roommate situation than joining a paramilitary organization.

“What exactly do you count throwing knives in the middle of the night as?” Nicky challenges. “Which reminds me. I have some for you.”

“Throwing knives isn’t the same.”

“Nile, you know what you’re doing,” Andy pipes up from the desk, still looking over blueprints. “You saved our asses last time, remember?”

She does. Fitting right into their little unit had felt natural. Sensible, almost, like everything had fit, like there was just a space for her.

But she’s basically a kid compared to them. A Marine, yes. But she shoots guns and now throws knives and holds her own in most hand-to-hand. These people have touched every weapon for a thousand or more years. Andy was worshipped as a  _ God of War _ . 

Nicky makes a humming noise, like he understands. “You have to remember, the American military?” He shakes his hand from side to side, a gesture she’d seen Joe do not five hours ago. “Their training?”

“Ah,” Joe says, like he now understands, where Nile absolutely does  _ not. _ Joe turns to her “Nile, we have no desire to make you into something new. You are part of this life  _ because _ of who you already are. Nile as she is is good enough.”

“And anything else you need, you’ll pick up on the road,” Andy adds. 

“I don’t…”

“I know your military likes to break people into small pieces,” Nicky says, mouth twisting. “Make them into soldiers. I remember, I joined an American unit once. We don’t need that. We’re happy with you.”

She…has no idea what to say to that. How to even  _ think _ about that.

“Anything you want to know, you can ask, and if we can help, we will,” Joe says.

Nile blinks and latches onto the offer. “I want to learn to shoot that,” she says, nodding towards Nicky’s sniper rifle as he packs it away to hide it. “And Andy promised me a sword.”

He laughs, a full laugh that makes his eyes crinkle up. “Some other day, sure.”

Andy parks and they walk to the warehouse their target and his victims should be in. Andy and Nicky nod at them and split off a few blocks away, going to the sniper’s nest Nicky identified via satellite images earlier. Joe and Nile walk towards the warehouse.

Nile, for her part, has three guns and two knives Nicky had provided her. She wears a loose black sweatshirt, so the average passerby can’t see the guns.

Joe looks as casual as anything, and even whistles a bit until they get closer. But then they’re within range, and they fall completely silent, making their way to the security blindspot in the fence.

Soon enough they’re in, and now it’s a waiting game. Their target will leave soon. Nicky will take the shot. Nile and Joe will be ready to ensure that no guards get particularly ambitious, and escort the girls inside out and towards the aid workers Copley alerted.

Nile knows how to wait. She was a Marine. She was the child of a single, overworked mother. She knows waiting.

It doesn’t mean she likes it much. Judging by the various facial expressions crossing Joe’s face in a constant stream, he doesn’t like it much either. “Nico’s the patient one,” he whispers to her. 

She nods. “Yeah. Sniper.”

“Yes. He will sit there for  _ days, _ just fine. Me? I much rather approach things more directly.”

The lights around the corner on the front side of the warehouse go out suddenly. Nile knows it’s Nicky, even if the only proof is the tinkling of broken glass. “Well, there’s our chance,” she says, standing up and moving to the side door.

Joe picks the lock much quicker than she could have—that’s another skill she wants them to show her, she makes a mental note—and quickly enough they’re inside.

They don’t know where exactly the young women—Nile’s age, or just a few years younger, but she could see how  _ young _ each other member of the team clearly thought them to be—are being kept, but it’s not hard to see once they’re inside.

Most of the warehouse is empty of people, just filled with boxes and trucks, the legitimate side of the shipping business. But there are walled-off sections in the back, and it doesn’t take a genius to figure out the rest.

They sneak alongside the perimeter, and they’re only halfway there when the shouting starts out front. Nicky took out the target, then, presumably, and will handle all the underlings he can.

Voices are raised inside then, and three people run past them, not even noticing them against the wall. Joe huffs, and starts to move faster.

He picks the lock again, and then the door is open and Nile fights hard to keep herself focused. It’s absolutely squalid in there, and the smell hits her first. They haven’t left this room in days, haven’t been given even the most basic care.

It’s not a large room, probably an office, but thirty or so women are shoved in there. There’s no way they could all lie down on the floor.

Joe produces an easy-going smile and keeps his hands visible and his gun stowed. “Hello,” he offers. “We’re here to take you away from this.”

They’re smart enough to keep the noise down, but a small scuffle breaks out as they all try to talk at once. Finally, the woman closest to them speaks up. “They took our passports, our IDs…everything we had.”

Joe nods decisively. “Any chance you saw where?”

She shrugs. “They didn’t take it until we got here. There’s another office, I think.”

Nile nods. “Joe, you get them out. I’ll be back in a second.”

“Nile, we can—”

“They need their passports, Joe.” She takes off at a brisk jog, making her way across the warehouse to the other office. She can still hear the commotion outside, and she doesn’t see anyone, so she shoots the lock off and goes inside. 

The room is a disordered, cluttered mess, but there is a filing cabinet. Nile rips them open and finds piles of documents. Every piece of paper that would have given these women the ability to travel, to get free, piled in here and all but forgotten. She grabs them up and stuffs her pockets with them, hoping she doesn’t miss any.

She flinches when she hears voices in the warehouse, and it takes an extra second to remember the flinch isn’t on her behalf. It’s not exactly a crisis if they find her snooping around. But there’s no way Joe and the women are clear yet, and they are a lot more breakable.

When she emerges, she purposefully kicks a box, and guns swing to point at her. She smiles, and Joe takes the momentary distraction to shoot the two men closest to him before ushering more women towards the back entrance. 

Nile draws her gun from her jeans, but doesn’t shoot. If she misses, if he moves, she’ll hit one of the women. The man looks torn for a second, between his “merchandise” walking out the door, and the woman who very clearly was just snooping in his dead boss’ office.

Nile makes the decision easy for him. She runs straight at him and uses her free hand to grab one of Nicky’s knives, throwing it.

She’s never done it while running before, and it’s not exactly a solid hit. Still, knife meets flesh, and now she’s pissed him off. 

Joe keeps his body between the women and the guard, and Nile just smiles and moves herself a little further away, running backwards. The man takes the bait and follows her, right out the door.

Someone blindsides her from the left, shooting for her shooting arm, and Nile drops the gun. Cursing through the pain, she turns to clock her new assailant and keeps moving, lest either of these men remember the women escaping out the back.

She reaches the door, and uses her shoulder to push it open. Nile emerges into a scene of carnage, six or seven bodies already laid out here, but she doesn’t get to look for long. Even with the lights shot out, the ambient city light is enough for them to get a clearer view of her, and they shoot at her once again.

A lucky shot has her cursing up a storm and landing on her back. She reaches for one of her backup pieces, the gun in a holster under her sweatshirt. She shoots one, and is fully expecting another bullet to rip into her—it’s hard to miss a prone form on the ground, after all—but when she turns, gun still raised, the man’s body is on the ground, a neat hole in his head.

“Huh.”

Nile stands and shakes off the recent wounds, already healed over, but some phantom memory still allows them to sting something awful. “Motherfucker,” she murmurs, but doesn’t give into pity, studiously ignoring the bodies, moving around the back of the building, looking for Joe and the others.

Joe gives her a raised eyebrow, and she shrugs. “Took care of it.”

“That you did. You okay?”

“Nothing that won’t heal,” she says, and he actually laughs a bit at her lame joke.

Andy and Nicky hang back while Joe and Nile deal with the aid workers, trying to keep at least some of them off the radar, trying to watch over the situation. Nile presents all the passports to the girl who spoke up about them in the first place, completely bypassing an aid worker. “Make sure these get to the right people?” She nods, so Nile nods back and leaves them to the experts.

Joe slings an arm around her shoulders. “Pretty badass,” he muses. “Luring them away. Getting one of them with a knife.”

She snorts. “Only in the shoulder, I think. I shot one too. Not sure if I killed him.”

He shrugs. “Well, they’re not all perfect shots. Still. Good job, Nile.”

She feels a little warm, all the way down to her belly.  _ Good job _ . She’d done real good tonight, real visible, tangible good. And yes, people died, and yes, she might have nightmares with their faces in it. But right now, she can’t bring herself to regret it.

They meet Andy and Nicky back at the car. “Thanks for the save,” Nile says, bumping Nicky’s shoulder.

“My pleasure,” Nicky says, and he gives her a quick smile before turning his full attention to Joe. He takes Joe’s forearms in hand to hold him steady, look him over. 

“Not even a scratch, Nico,” he murmurs. “We’re fine.” He turns to Andy, even if he doesn’t move out of Nicky’s grasp. “Easy job, Boss. All of them are safe. Nile even rescued their passports for them.”

Andy’s nod is short and sharp. Something cold passes over her face. Like winter blizzards, Nile thinks, that ice that will bury you.

She shivers and gets in the car.

She has a decent amount of blood on her, so she gets first shower. When she’s done, Andy is gone. “What happened?”

Nicky shrugs from where he sits on the couch, Joe’s head in his lap. “Andy went out.”

“Is that safe?” It sounds foolish as soon as she says it, and Joe’s snort confirms it. 

“She’s Andromache of Scythia. She can kill just about anyone. She’s mortal, Nile. But she’s not fragile.”

“Right.” She hesitates, but she’s been with them for four months, and they tell her everything she ever asks to hear. “How hard did she take today?”

“Hard,” Nicky confirms. “But she admired your work, Nile.”

Well that’s…great, she supposes, although she didn’t ask the question for praise. 

“Should we wait up for her?”

“She’ll come home when she comes home.”

“Then I guess I’m going to bed.”

“Sleep well.”

She doesn’t, of course. Because that would be too much to ask.

No, she’s up a few hours later, gasping awake from drowning yet again, dizzy with the lack of oxygen even though she can breathe just fine.

Before she can even see straight again, she scrambles for her bag and her notebook inside it, transcribing every detail of the dream, exactly as she remembers it.

She reads it back, after. There’s nothing new, at least not that she can notice. Cold, check. Almost no light, check. Same fish and plant life she’s seen before. Sandy, not rocky.

Nile’s already done the numbers. Light penetrates the ocean up to a thousand meters in perfect conditions, but drops off rapidly after two hundred meters. She can see Quynh and the coffin, so there has to be some light. Quynh must be feeling the pressure, even if she is only two hundred meters down. As far as Nile can determine, humans can survive the pressure deeper than that, but it takes preparation and equipment and pain. Humans haven’t really dived much deeper than three hundred meters, though.

Submarines can go deeper, of course, but Nile has to assume the coffin doesn’t act as much protection. It’s not watertight, after all. She rubs a hand absently over her chest, still feels water burning her lungs. Definitely not. And Quynh is feeling the pressure but not dying of it, so that limits the depth she can be at.

It’s a start. Quynh is somewhere cold—no surprise, considering the Atlantic—and at a depth between two hundred and three hundred meters.

Nile groans and sets her notebook down. All things she knew last night.

She waits an hour, hoping Nicky will get the picture and go back to bed. Then she changes and goes for a run, figuring if Andy is allowed to run around a city where they pissed off the criminal underworld not twelve hours before, Nile should be too.

Nile returns with pastries to find Nicky and Joe puttering around, still clearly tired and both with epic cases of bed head. They perk up when she arrives, and each take a pastry.

She leaves them with the box and a warning to save the chocolate croissant for her and heads to take a shower, stripping off her sweaty clothes and stepping in when the water is as hot as it will go.

The water hits her face and she freezes. Her breaths start coming in shallower, then it’s almost like she can’t get any at all.

She stumbles out of the shower stall, hand on her chest trying to get her breath back. In. Out. In. Out.

When her breathing is approximating steady, she has to fight a laugh. Second-hand trauma. Right. Nothing is good about this immortal thing.

The water is still running, though, and hopefully Joe and Nicky haven’t heard her freak out. She steps back under the water, being very careful to keep her face out of the spray.

They must see something on her face when she emerges, or else they did hear her, because Nicky asks, “So, Nile. What would you like to do today?”

“Don’t we have to leave town? After, you know, killing people last night?”

“Not necessarily,” Joe says, picking up the conversation from Nicky. “They’re dead, and even if they did have friends, well. We’ll be fine. So. Want to see Hollywood?”

They take a hop-on, hop-off bus, and they pay for Nile to get the audio guide, only she ignores the entire thing to hear about the two years Joe spent working in the film industry in the late forties. “Sort of like a break,” he muses, “after everything. But let me tell you, Nile, the work was almost as cut-throat as anything else we do.”

Joe, it turns out, worked in production— “He could have been a film star,” Nicky predictably interjects, “and several people asked him,  _ begged _ him. Alas, we must avoid the spotlight” —and has stories for days. Nile misses a fair number of the sights and doesn’t really mind.

Then they take her shopping— “Nile, you ran in  _ jeans _ this morning” —which leads to her and Joe trying to talk Nicky into something beside bulk t-shirts. He just shrugs about the clothes but lets them add them to their pile, clearly not invested either way.

They bring dinner back to the hotel and find Andy asleep at the kitchen table, head cradled in her hands. She startles awake when they open the door, sits up straight and blinks blearily at them.

“Good night?” Nicky asks.

“Very.”

Joe goes to put the food on the table, and then he drops it in a hurry and grabs Andy’s hands. Nile can see that they’re scuffed up, with scrapes along her knuckles. “Andy.”

“Joe.” She says it just as firmly, but Joe doesn’t drop her gaze.

“Would you like a damn cape?” He grouches, but sighs after a minute. “Nile, will you get me the first aid kit? It’s in Nicky’s bag. The, uh, blue one.”

Nile does, thankful that it’s practically right on top and she doesn’t have to dig through their stuff. 

“ —Joe, I don’t  _ need _ —”

“Yes you do, Andy, now shut up a moment.”

She’s glaring daggers at him, but Joe doesn’t back down, still holding her hand. He takes the first aid kit from Nile with his free hand and spares her a tiny smile.

“Who’d you punch?” Nile asks.

“Rapist.”

Nile shrugs. “Deserved it, then.”

“Of course he deserved it,” Joe mutters. “Just…protect yourself, Andy.”

“It’s scraped knuckles, Joe.”

“You act like you have them all the time.”

The room goes very, very quiet. “Well, it’s the new normal,” Andy says, deceptively even. “So get used to it. I’ve lived like I’ve lived for longer than you’ve been alive, several times over. I’m not changing now.”

Joe finishes her knuckles in absolute silence, closes the kit with precise, careful motions, and sets it aside. “No one’s asking you to change, Andy,” he says, as neutrally as he presumably can muster. “Just…call us first.”

Andy grunts, which even Nile knows is not an agreement, but it’s also the best Joe will get.

“Check out in the morning,” Andy says instead of continuing the conversation, and Joe just nods.

They don’t go back to Australia. They don’t stay in America, either, which is probably a good idea. Los Angeles and Chicago are nothing alike and yet Nile is still tempted to go home. 

They end up in Egypt, in Cairo, and Nile gets treated to multiple walking tours courtesy of her new family, because it turns out Nicky and Joe lived here once or twice, and Andy is  _ older than the pyramids _ . Her head spins, but they’re certainly better than any modern tour guide.

She has the apartment to herself one afternoon—Nicky and Joe have gone food shopping, and Andy has disappeared somewhere—when she finally bites the bullet and calls Copley.

“I need your help.”

“Are you in trouble?”

“No. No, I’m fine. I just…I need a few things.”

“Of course.”

She takes a deep breath. “I need Booker’s number. To start.”

“I thought you said a hundred years.”

“They said a hundred years. I need him.”

He hesitates only a moment, but he gives her the number. “I have not been in contact with him,” he warns. “I only checked where he was living. Like Andy asked.” That’s news to Nile, although she supposes it makes sense. “But from what I saw…he’s not in the best place.”

Nile feels terrible for him. Feels like he maybe got what he deserved. It makes her stomach churn, uncomfortable urges warring back and forth, and reminds herself she recused herself from the conversation for a reason.

Whatever else happened, she’s fine with Booker. A little pissed off, a little leery of him, but ultimately fine. Andy, Joe, and Nicky, though, they got to decide how they grieve. He was their brother. And they made their choice.

But she needs him.

“Oui?”

He sounds drunk, she knows. She also knows that she doesn’t care much. “Booker.”

“Nile? Jesus, kid. How’d you get this number?”

“I’m a millennial.”

“Copley?”

“Yeah.”

“Everything’s okay, right? No one’s…Andy’s…”

“Andy’s fine.” Andy’s picking fights when she goes out, Andy’s hanging back in fights when they have a job and hating them for it, a bit. She’s alive, and right now, that might be all Booker’s entitled to know. 

Booker lets out a sigh so heavy she can hear it over the line, can practically see him deflating. “Then what do you need, Nile? It’s only been a few months.”

“I can tell time, Booker.” She sighs, and makes sure she has a pen. “When was the last time you dreamed about Quynh?”

He is very silent for a moment. “A week ago.”

She whistles. “Damn, I’m lucky if I get three days. They leave off as you get older?”

“They leave off if I drink myself into unconsciousness before I sleep, Nile.”

“Oh.”

“Oui. So. Why did you want to know? I’m sorry, but I cannot tell you that they get better.”

“Mm, I could have guessed. No, I need you…I need you to have another one.”

“I cannot summon them at will,” he says after a moment of silence.

“You can if you stop drinking. I need one, Booker. And I need you to write down everything you remember. Every detail.”

“Why?”

“Because there’s a goddamn point to these dreams, right? I have to believe that.”

“Life has no point.”

She sighs, not sure why she expected any more than that absolute nihilism. “One dream. You owe them that much.”

He’s very silent again. “Fine.”

He sends her a long text message of every detail he can remember two days later. She pours over it, enters it into her own notes, and compares details. He notices the barnacles growing on the metal, describes them for her a bit, and she makes a mental note to look for them next time she dreams. He points out the direction the cold water currents flow, something she imagines takes thousands of repetitions to really get. She jots it down and frowns.

She’s looked up maps, ocean floor depths and current charts on the decrepit laptop they’ve all been sharing. She really should get her own laptop at some point, one with a little more power and a lot more privacy. But the information she’s getting is a start.

Seaweeds and plants. Currents and temperature. Light and depth. Fish. Barnacles. It’s progress, at least.

Of course, it’s perhaps on point for her to have a nightmare about Quynh that night, after thinking about her all day. She wakes up gasping for breath, and the currents Booker has or hasn’t noticed are the very last thing on her mind.

She can’t get her breath back, even as she knows she can breath just fine, that nothing happened to her, and that, even if it did, it couldn’t do long term harm. Shakily, she gets to her feet, determined to escape the suddenly claustrophobic room.

Only to nearly stumble over Nicky in the hallway, clearly waiting for her. He’s also looking like shit, which does more to help her settle than anything.

“Outside?” He rasps.

She studies him. His eyes look haunted, and he’s clutching at his own arm, too tight, likely leaving quickly-healing bruises.

“Nightmare?”

He hums in agreement. “Outside?” He asks again, but he doesn’t move.

She studies him, and guesses some things. “Fuck that, you look ready to fall apart,” she decides. “What makes you feel better after a nightmare?” She already knows the answer though, without him having to say it. “Own oxygen mask first. Go back to Joe.”

He just stares at her for a long moment, then nods decisively. She gets ready to go downstairs and outside herself. Andy is probably awake. But Nicky gently takes her wrist and drags her along behind him.

Joe is awake, for a certain value of awake. He squints blearily at them, and some tension eases out of his shoulder when he sees Nicky come back. He nods once, and scoots further back until he’s all the way against the wall, throwing the blanket back.

The bed is only a double, but Nicky slots right in next to Joe and tugs Nile down in front of him. He hesitantly wraps her up, then more firmly when she relaxes.

She should feel claustrophobic, should feel trapped—like Quynh is trapped, dying again and again and again, fighting her way out and getting nowhere—but she doesn’t. 

She feels loved, something relaxing in her she didn’t even realize was tense.

Joe mutters something that might be an approximation of  _ goodnight _ , and Nicky taps her forearm twice, and she falls into a dreamless sleep.


	4. Chapter Four

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Nile will pull this family together come hell or high water.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hello, all!
> 
> Here's chapter four.
> 
> Warning: Andy, Joe, and Nicky get into situations where they are in serious danger, related to the ocean and drowning. Everyone will be okay.
> 
> Also, warning for a brief discussion of survivor's guilt.
> 
> I hope you enjoy!

She’s woken by Joe and Nicky at dawn, but she’s managed to sleep all the way until dawn, and that’s impressive in itself.

So Joe prays and Nicky goes to cook and Nile goes for a run, and she comes back to Joe holding Nicky while he kneads dough in the kitchen, the two of them singing softly along with the radio.

Andy for her part is reading a book, definitely not in English, but she seems to be watching Joe and Nicky as much as anything else and she smiles softly, a little wistfully, maybe.

Nile thinks of what Andy told her, about Booker possibly implying Nicky and Joe being Nicky and Joe drove him to it, about how they both worried maybe she and Andy felt the same. She hopes they know that, yes, they can be corny and too cute to bear, but their love isn’t something to overcome. It’s probably the glue holding them all together.

Nicky promises the bread is for dinner tonight and that breakfast is actually almost done, so she nods and goes to shower, and when she comes downstairs, she brings her notebook.

She debated waiting, get more information before she approached them, but she figures that there have probably been enough secrets. Even if she can’t see any danger in this, even if it probably would protect them more to wait, they deserve to not have any secrets between them.

At the end of the day, they’re good people. And Nile just wants to give them whatever she can.

Joe sees the notebook first. “Ah, are we finally going to learn what the book is for? Writing a novel, Nile?”

She snorts. “Not my style.”

“Never say never,” Andy says, settling at the table. “I wasn’t a fan of writing when it caught on, but I eventually caved.”

Nile blinks at her. “Have you written a novel, Andy?”

“None under my own name.”

Obviously. She blinks at Andy a few times, but Joe just waves it off. “Like we all haven’t written a novel a time or two,” he scoffs.

Nicky smirks and nudges Joe. “It has been far more than one or two, my love.”

“We are coming back to this. Later,” Nile promises. Her fingers tighten on the book. “No, this is more of a…research project.”

“What are you researching, Nile?” Nicky asks.

“How do you find new immortals?”

“Same way we found you.”

“Although it used to take longer.”

“Just piece the clues together. Wait for new information. Keep moving a little closer every time.”

Nile nods. “Yeah, so. I’ve, uh. Been trying to do that.”

They all stare at her. “There are no new immortals,” Nicky says slowly.

It dawns on Joe first. “No. But there’s an old one.” His voice is very quiet, but it seems to pierce Andy as well as any knife.

Her knuckles go white as she clenches her fists. “Nile—”

“Hear me out. Please,” she asks. “I know—I know you’ve tried. You’ve been through this. But I have a literal view into what’s happening every other night. I’ve compiled every piece of information I can. Likely depths, currents, marine life. All of it. I’ve been comparing best I can. I just need—”

“Do you think we didn’t already try all this?” One of Andy’s fists has curled around her knife now, and Nile does not think Andy would stab her, even as distressed as she is, but she keeps an eye on the hand.

“I think you tried everything you could,” she says as evenly as possible. “I also think you had incomplete information. You couldn’t see her.”

“Booker could,” Nicky says quietly.

She debated not mentioning this part, but she meant it when she decided no secrets. “He’s helped me, a little. I wouldn’t have been able to track the currents without him. And now we have…we know more about  _ Mars _ than we do our own ocean, you know that? Our knowledge of the ocean has grown so much in recent years, and it’s  _ still _ incomplete. I just think with all the information Booker and I have been forced to watch, with the advances in tech and our modern understanding of how oceans work in the last few years, we might have a shot.” Andy’s hand hasn’t eased up around the knife. “I know—it was an impossible situation, you were put in. There was no way to find her, and I know you’ve tried. I’m just saying. I might be another chance.”

Joe’s mouth tightens, and Nicky looks down at his plate for thirty long seconds before looking back at her. “Nile. What have you found?”

She shrugs. “I’ve been kind of checking it off, like some sort of brain teaser? Well, she has to be this deep, so that leaves these places. The currents work this way, so I think that leaves these ones now. This plant grows here but not there…” She shakes her head. “I need an expert to confirm some stuff. Like an oceanographer and a marine biologist. I can…well, Copley can get me that.”

“What do you need from us?” Andy says, and Nile’s never heard this quiet voice from her, but she fears it a bit.

“What do you know about the ship she was taken on?”

“Nothing,” Joe says. “No one admitted to having a giant iron coffin as part of their cargo. We don’t even know the official day she was taken. We found Andy two, maybe three weeks later, but it…well, it was a dungeon. Andy couldn’t track the days. And while  _ I _ wouldn’t wait around in port if I had a woman in a coffin, there’s no guarantee they went out to sea that day.”

So they really have been stumbling around in the dark for centuries now. Joe and Nicky told her they searched for ages, until the search proved too dangerous and Andy had been forced to surrender it in favor of not losing Joe or Nicky. It really had been a needle in a haystack.

“Any ideas?”

“We heard a rumor,” Nicky says. “A sailor drunk in a tavern, sharing stories to impress women. He was a sailor on the _ Nightingale _ .”

“We never confirmed that,” Andy mutters. “Most of them were already dead by that point.” 

Nile half wants to ask what happened to the ones who weren’t already dead. Maybe they were just hard to track down. She’ll choose to believe that.

“What do you know about the  _ Nightingale?” _

“In one of my caves, I have every scrap of paper we could collect,” Andy admits. She takes a deep, shaky breath, then nods. “Call Copley.”

“Boss…” Joe says. He doesn’t sound like he’s protesting, necessarily, but he’s looking at Andy with soft eyes, extending a hand.

She shakes it off. “Call Copley,” she repeats, then turns to Joe and Nicky. “I don’t care if this is just more false hope. I don’t care if this turns out to be nothing. I…I don’t have much time left, guys, and I could stand a little hope before I die.” Her eyes get very, very distant. “Maybe this is why I’ve been given this long. Maybe that’s why I’m mortal  _ now _ . Maybe it’s almost done. One way or the other.”

Nile almost points out that Andy doesn’t believe in God, doesn’t believe in someone to give or take away her immortal gifts, but wisely keeps her mouth shut.

“I’ll get us a ride,” Nicky says. “The cave in Spain, Andy?”

Andy nods, and they don’t get another word out of her until they’re leaving the house.

Copley finds her both a marine biologist and oceanographer who she can find in Madrid, and Nicky books them two cargo plane flights and a train ride. Joe rents them a car for the last leg of the journey, using a fake name and paying cash, and it doesn’t take too long for them to arrive at another of Andy’s caves.

There’s weaponry of the ancient variety, and boxes of unknown contents. No famous sculptures this time, although there are drop cloths over items in the back, so Nile figures there’s still time to find something surprising.

Andy unerringly goes to the right box, and Nile has to wonder how often she does this. If she looks for Quynh when the others aren’t around, with no heading, no clue. 

She presents Nile the box by extending her arm towards it, and Nile carefully lifts out documents centuries older than she is.

A shipping manifest, with ports. No map, but it would be easy enough to compare the manifest to old shipping routes. She makes a mental note to have Copley find her a historian, too, one who specializes in this type of thing. She doesn’t even know if that  _ is _ a specialty, but she figures people get into some really niche stuff.

“Andromache…” Nicky says, and Andy shakes her head.

“No, Nicky. I…we have to do this. One last chance.” She touches the necklace around her throat, using it as a touchstone the same way Nile uses her cross. She turns to Nile. “Let’s get this to the car.”

The trip to Madrid is made in silence. Nicky drives, and Nile looks through the box she and Andy threw between them in the back. Andy looks like she’s trying to nod off, but constantly failing. 

Nile has never seen Andy not able to sleep when she wanted to before.

She gives Joe the directions Copley gave her so he can steer Nicky to the university campus. Nile looks around and whistles a bit. “Nice.”

“Did you go to college?” Joe asks her.

“Nope. Not yet. When I was done with the Marines, I wanted to. Art History, if I could convince myself to go the non-practical way.”

Joe snorts lightly. “Well, the beauty of immortality is you can go to university as many times as you want. And you never have to be practical.”

“Yes, Nile. You are looking at the man with three PhDs in Art History,” Nicky adds. “And several bachelor’s degrees, when he is less inclined to do so much writing.”

Joe shrugs. “It’s particularly amusing when it’s my art.”

Nile…has so many questions there, like does she know any of Joe’s art? Is it in museums? How is this just coming up now? But they’re at the door, and Nile can save the conversation for later.

She almost wishes she knew what Copley told these researchers, because they are both incredibly accommodating and ask no questions about what Nile’s purpose with all this is. She wishes she could photograph her own nightmares, to show them what she sees. But she uses her journal, does the best she can to describe things. Between Google and the many books the marine biologist has lying around her office, she gets scientific names for the plants and barnacles and fish she’s been seeing.

The oceanographer comes back with a large map, showing Europe and Africa and the Atlantic. They lay a plastic sheet over it, and start using dry erase markers to map off areas.

Nicky calls Copley for her, and soon enough a historian shows up at the office and only has a minor freak out about the relatively well preserved documents Andy carefully watches him handle. 

They still don’t know if the  _ Nightingale _ is the correct ship, but at least they’re able to map out a relatively likely trade route for the ship to follow.

The circles shrink, the search area becomes more focused. Nile describes the currents Booker feels as best she can secondhand, and the oceanographer asks pointed questions she does her best to answer. The circles shrink again.

Andy, Joe, and Nicky watch this whole thing with wide eyes, heads turning back and forth as information comes out. 

Joe once teased Nicky about a pirate phase, and she wonders about them, on old-timey ships, searching random locations, praying that this time is the time. Chasing a ship that only maybe was the right ship—Nile is still fucked if the  _ Nightingale _ isn’t the right ship, she knows, but at least her odds are better—and hoping. Guessing, really, until all hope was gone.

It took them seventy-three years to find the Titanic underwater, and that was a huge chunk of metal that they knew exactly when and where it sank.

The search area is dramatically narrowed. Nile squints at the shipping lane, not exactly lined up, and asks about drifting over, say, hundreds and hundreds of years. She gets a very impassioned explanation, and it looks like it might be plausible that the  _ Nightingale _ could have dropped the coffin on their usual route, and Quynh could have ended up in one of their highlighted spots.

The search area isn’t reduced to nothing. On the contrary, she still has three spots, each quite large.

But it’s better than the whole damn Atlantic.

“Is this, like, treasure hunting or something?” The oceanographer asks eventually, when Nile is rolling up their map, carefully marked.

“Yes,” Andy says shortly, collecting her documents. “Let’s move.”

Andy sits at the dingy hotel table and stares straight ahead until long after everyone else has finished eating. “I have to do this,” she announces, hand once again touching her necklace. “If it’s the last thing I do in this damn life. Then it’ll be the best thing I do in this life.”

Nile nods. “I’ll get us a ship.”

Copley comes through again, and she’d really start to worry about all his CIA contacts if they weren’t working out so conveniently for her. She doesn’t want to know the money paid to get an entire research team on a state of the art research vessel just for their search, but they have it now.

Which leads to Nile’s current predicament, discovering sea sickness for the first time.

Joe rubs her back while Nicky runs to the kitchen for ginger tea and cookies, and Nile just groans and rests her head against a toilet. “I quit.”

Joe has the audacity to laugh at her. “It’ll settle down in a few hours.”

“If I die, will it go away faster?”

“It’s not going to kill you, Nile.”

“You don’t know that.”

He laughs again, but continues rubbing her back.

She can at least drink her tea at a table, stomach still queasy but at least seemingly done with throwing up. She sips slowly. “Where’s Andy?”

“On deck. Staring out at the sea like she’ll see Quynh before the sonar does.”

Nile nods. “Do you think we’ll find her?”

They exchange a look that seems to be an entire conversation, and she doesn’t even attempt to decipher it. “I think,” Nicky says very gently, “that you gave Andy exactly what she needed. Hope.”

“Hope isn’t good enough if it doesn’t pay off.”

“On the contrary,” Joe says. “Hope is what keeps us moving. And eventually, we just have to hope we’ll find her.”

Her stomach settles, true to Joe’s word, and she wanders up to deck in the calm evening air. Andy’s not hard to spot, sitting at the bow, watching.

“Hey.”

Andy grunts in acknowledgement, but continues staring. “I gave up on her.”

“You did it to protect Nicky and Joe, from what they say.” She never got the whole story, but it seems like a storm had hit, and Nicky had almost been lost to the sea. It seemed cruel to ask for more, when Joe started shivering even just that far into the retelling of it.

“I gave up on her.”

Nile sighs. It’s true, she guesses. Andy made a choice, and the right reasons don’t change the fact that Quynh is at the bottom of the sea and has been for too long. “What were you supposed to do?”

“Not let her get taken from me in the first place.”

That’s ridiculous, but Nile just hums. “Too bad our super healing doesn’t come with superhuman strength.”

“I should have…should have bitten my own arms off or something. Gotten her free.”

She raises an eyebrow. “I don’t think we can do that.” They’d probably heal too fast, even assuming Andy could somehow get through her bones.

“It should have been me.”

Nile takes a deep, shaky breath, imagines this has been the line of thinking for centuries, and was wondering how long it would take them to arrive here. “You couldn’t control that, Andy. You didn’t choose this. You didn’t do this to her.”

Andy shakes a bit, and Nile doesn’t think it’s from the breeze. She moves so she’s a bit closer, and lets Andy close the rest of the gap, until they’re sitting side by side, hips pressed together, watching the inky black sea together.

Nile just nods along and pretends to understand all the technical stuff that’s being explained to her. She trusts the crew Copley found them to know how to work their equipment, if nothing else.

Andy stands on deck still with a furrow on her brow as they arrive at the first circle on Nile’s map. “I don’t know if we ever searched here,” she murmurs, but then gestures expansively to the miles and miles of blue ocean that surround them. “But honestly? How would I tell?”

“Needle in a haystack,” Nile nods.

Andy snorts. “Yeah. You got it.”

There’s not a lot for any of them to do while the search takes place. Andy, Nicky, and Joe seem to have a passing understanding of the equipment around them all, but they’re clearly not the experts, and, judging by one frown Nicky gets when he attempts to start an earnest conversation, their information may be a little out of date.

Joe and Nicky spend their time on deck with Andy and Nile, using sweaters to protect from the winds and reading books. Joe periodically pulls out his sketchbook, sketching them each in turn with the sea as a backdrop.

Andy paces. Andy paces and refuses to sleep, even at night, which Nile knows because she spends her nights awake with Andy on the deck.

The first area comes up empty.

But they identified three, so Nile doesn’t lose hope, and she tries not to think how shitty she’ll feel if she led the other three on a wild goose chase for their friend.

The second area takes two days to search, and Nicky makes piles of sugary treats, hoping to ease some of Andy’s worry. It doesn’t work, and they don’t find anything.

“It’s not the end,” Nile murmurs to Joe, fidgeting with her own hands. “If this doesn’t pan out. I’ll keep looking. I’ll find some other clue. I’ll—“

Joe pulls her hands into his own and squeezes affectionately. “Nile, listen carefully. However this turns out, no one blames you. You did not throw Quynh in the ocean. But you came to us and you never met her. You barely know us, to be honest. And yet you poured your heart into this. That means something, Nile.” 

“She’s just in so much pain,” Nile murmurs, shivering a little at the reminder.

“Quynh, or Andy?”

“Both.”

Joe makes a hum of agreement. “You know, when Andy looks at you, she sees hope. And whatever else happens, you’ve given her this hope back.”

“And if we don’t find her?”

“Then you just remind her that there’s hope we can try again.”

The second zone comes up empty, and Nile finds herself biting her nails as they move to the third zone.

There’s only so many viable locations, given the currents and plant life and depth, but maybe she was wrong about the  _ Nightingale _ . They could be totally off course.

Whatever Joe says about hope, she’s not sure Andy will handle them failing yet again positively at  _ all _ .

The water is a little rockier when they get to their third search area, and Nile is not too ashamed to admit that she threw up over the side a time or two. Nicky brings her a thermos full of ginger tea and some ginger candies, and she sips it on deck.

It begins spitting rain, and Nile retreats under cover but keeps watching Andy, who hasn’t moved, like the rain doesn’t even bother her. For all Nile knows, maybe she hasn’t even noticed.

There’s a commotion that rises to fill the ship, like bubbles in a shaken soda spilling over. One of the researchers runs to find her. “We found something,” she says, half out of breath.

“You sure?”

“It’s the right size. It’s metallic. It could be something else, but…”

No. It’s not, and Nile knows it.

Nicky and Joe are already making their way to her, and they go outside to Andy.

“Andy, they think they found something.”

Nile didn’t even know it would be possible for Andy to get more still, but somehow she impossibly does it. “She’s not staying down there another second. Not until the rain ends, not until morning. Now.”

Joe and Nicky look at each other. “We know.”

Joe and Nicky dress for diving, helping each other get ready, murmuring back and forth. It’s not in English or Spanish, so Nile has no idea what they’re saying, but she knows it’s private and knows to give them their space.

Eventually they walk back out onto the deck, geared up for a dive. “Relax, Nile,” Joe says. “We’re actually pretty good at this.”

They probably are, because they’re old and one of their closest friends is trapped at the bottom of the sea, but Nicky’s lips go tight. And Nile gets it; however much practice they have at scuba diving, going into the ocean when they know what happens to immortals in the ocean seems like a risk.

Hell, these guys fought their way out of a lab not even six months ago. Fought their way out of eternal confinement.

But they don’t hesitate.

They haven’t skipped on any modern equipment. Nicky and Joe have plenty of oxygen for themselves—and Quynh as well, not that any of the other crew fully gets that—and they’re even sporting cameras, so they can keep an eye on them throughout the dive. 

They also have a tether, and Nile almost asks what the point is. It doesn’t attach them to the ship, only to each other. And then Nile realizes with a heavy feeling in her gut that that’s the point. If they’re lost at sea, they’ve decided they’ll be lost together.

She has to turn away from it, but she does pull herself together to give them a small smile as they go into the water. From there, all Nile can do is keep her eye on the tablet showing their camera feed.

She’s not convinced Andy isn’t vibrating beside her.

“What the hell,” the researcher who told Nile of the find in the first place mutters to her, being the only one brave enough to approach them. “I know you guys are, like, CIA, but…”

“Yeah, thank you,” Nile interrupts, and she wouldn’t be this rude except she absolutely does not want anyone near Andy right now. “Can you go monitor the equipment?”  
She huffs and leaves, and Nile watches Andy, the tablet, and the choppy water.

The water is getting rougher. At first she thought it was her imagination, but it’s certainly real enough. The rain is picking up, the waves are growing.

She bites her lip, reminds herself that Joe and Nicky know what they’re doing.

There’s practically no light down there except what Joe and Nicky brought down with them, and it takes them shining the light around for a few moments for them to catch the coffin. But that’s definitely what it is. Nile’s breath catches and she can’t quite seem to get it back, just tilting the tablet for Andy.

Andy stops breathing, she’s pretty sure. 

Nicky’s camera pushes closer, and then he pulls a tool off his belt to break the lock. It takes four tries, but it’s already relatively rusted and it breaks.

Quynh is free of her prison for the first time in centuries.

Not that she knows it. She looks dead, and Joe gently takes her body, gets the second oxygen line in her mouth. The first oxygen Quynh’s had in  _ centuries _ .

They kick off and start making their way up, careful to go slow and wait to avoid the bends, even if they could all recover from it.

Quynh wakes up, and she fights them. Fights the oxygen too, by the looks of it. Fights everything giving her a chance, probably just overwhelmed beyond Nile’s comprehension.

“No,” Andy mumbles, fingers reaching out for the screen.

Joe and Nicky simply tighten their grasp on her and keep tugging her upward. 

The waves have picked up, the wind driving harder. The boat rocks side to side, and Nile very firmly focuses on the task at hand so she doesn’t throw up.

“Did I...shit, did I kill them all?” Andy asks, hands gripping the railings tight enough for her knuckles to go white.

“Joe and Nicky know what they’re doing,” Nile soothes. “They agreed with you. You know they don’t do things just because you asked.”

“This time, they would,” Andy mumbles, and doesn’t say anymore. Her eyes look so far away, like she sees straight through the tablet and into some horrible future, and Nile bites her lip.

Quynh must logically process that she’s not dying, but logic is likely far from her mind, so she spits out the tube feeding her oxygen, thrashing in Joe and Nicky’s hold, almost getting away.

It’s the longest Quynh has gone without dying in centuries, and Nile hoped it was over, but they watch her die again not long before they break the surface, and Andy makes an inhuman wail that sends shivers up Nile’s spine.

Their heads break the surface. Someone re-trains the ship’s floodlights to focus on them, and she sees three heads pop up, one lying limp.

Then she sees a wave wash over them all, pushing them around, pulling them apart.

Quynh, completely deadweight and unable to stabilize herself, starts to get pulled away, into the waves and under. Joe and Nicky reach for her, but Nile also sees them reach for each other, and their grip is not enough.

“Fuck this,” Andy mutters. “I’m not doing this again.” Before Nile can protest, she’s over the side and into the water. Nile reaches out after her, but she’s already gone.

Andy is a strong swimmer, fighting the waves to get out to them, but even she’s not stronger than the ocean. Quynh revives just as Andy reaches her, and they’re both pulled under again.

Nile bites her lip and fights back a scream. She’s not a strong enough swimmer for this, got through her swim week with the Marines and that’s it. She can’t go help. She’d honestly be more of a hindrance. All she can do is watch.

Andy and Quynh have been under a long time. Too long. She thinks she might see them bob back up when a wave passes, but she can’t be sure. 

Nicky and Joe are clearly honing in on where they think the two women are, cutting through the waves, and Nile feels her breath catch, her heart hammering in her chest. Will she lose all four of them? Did she bring them to sea just to lose them?

Nicky pulls his arm back, and his hand is clasped around a forearm. Quynh. A moment later, Joe has Andy.

Both women look limp, like rag dolls. Nile clutches a hand over her mouth, forgetting the tablet and letting it fall. Not Andy.

Joe and Nicky start cutting back towards the ship, movement hampered by their loads, getting knocked around in the waves. Quynh wakes up and fights Nicky, and almost drags him down with her until Joe stabs her with his diving knife.

They make it back. Nile thinks she’s shaking, thinks she might fall over or pass out, but has to keep it together long enough to see this through.

However it ends, but she doesn’t let herself think about that.

Joe comes up first with Andy, then Nicky with Quynh. Nile helps them pull the women up, lays them out on the deck while Nicky and Joe grab at each other on the pretense of shedding some of the equipment.

Neither woman is breathing. Ignoring Quynh, Nile moves to Andy, checks for a pulse. Nothing. 

She starts compressions, slow and steady, counting in her head. Nothing.

Quynh comes back and Joe and Nicky restrain her, shove themselves in her face and remind her again and again who they are. Tell her she’s free.

Andy doesn’t wake up.

“Goddammit, Andy, you don’t get to choose to die like this,” Nile nearly snarls, starting a second round of compressions.

Andy sits bolt upright, almost knocking Nile on her ass. She looks around for a moment, and then rolls her body over to Quynh. Joe and Nicky fall back, giving her the space.

“Quynh, Quynh…”

Quynh quiets, and looks to Andy. Blinks unsteadily, and Nile belatedly realizes that even this stormy night might be too much light for her to adjust to. She knows their immortal bodies repair themselves, but Quynh has had minimal light for hundreds of years. Any light might be too much to see with.

“Andromache?”

Andy places her hands on Quynh’s face and brings their foreheads together. It’s raining and they’re both soaked, so Nile can’t confirm Andy’s crying, but she’s pretty sure she is.

“Andromache.”

“I’m here. I’m here.” Andy takes a breath so deep Nile sees her whole body move. “I have you, Quynh.”

Quynh’s hands shake, but she grabs Andy back, pulling her down entirely on top of her. Andy falls with a huff, but makes absolutely no move to get back up.

Nile drifts back towards Nicky and Joe, who are still definitely clinging to each other, but are more focused on the Andy and Quynh show than each other. “You did it,” she says, nudging Joe’s shoulder.

He nudges her right back. “Group effort, Nile. But mostly you. We wouldn’t be here without you.”

Nile lets out a shaky breath and lets herself sag a bit. They catch her, which is frankly amazing after what they just went through. “We’re okay,” she says, and belatedly realizes that she’s crying. “We’re all okay.”

She starts sinking towards the deck, and Joe and Nicky follow her right down, surrounding her while they watch Quynh and Andy, only a few feet away.

The rain doesn’t let up, and eventually Quynh seems lucid enough for them to drag her inside. She’s not really clothed in any meaningful way, considering how long her clothes have been in salt water, so Nile brings her some of Andy’s things while she gets her and Andy changes of clothes. Nicky goes for him and Joe, but she and Nicky seem to have the same idea, back within minutes, still soaking and changing right there.

Assuming Quynh remains stable, Nile has a feeling they’ll all be sleeping together—and eating together and living together at all times—for a while now.

Andy helps Quynh change, laughs when Quynh tilts her head at the zipper, laughs again when the clothes dwarf Quynh. Nile should have maybe offered some of her own clothes, but Quynh seems to be happy in Andy’s things. And anyways, she’s never heard Andy laugh like that. Ever.

Quynh and Andy forgo any distance and Quynh sits directly on top of her. Andy seems to be far from complaining, wrapping an arm around Quynh’s waist and holds her.

“What were you thinking?” Joe asks, trying to get his hair dry and somehow still managing to level a relatively impressive glare at Andy. “Diving in like that? You could have died!”

Andy glares back, but she only looks at him a moment before looking back to Quynh. “I was thinking that if I only had a little time left, the only thing I still have left to do is getting Quynh back. That’s it.” She brushes Quynh’s cheek, as if to prove she’s real. Nile watches Quynh settle even further against Andy, if that were at all possible. “Besides. Worked out for me.”

“You almost drowned,” Nicky protests.

“I did drown.”

Nicky scoffs. “You came damn close, Andromache.”

Andy turns away from Quynh to give them all the eye again. “You think I don’t know what dying feels like, Nicolò? I’ve been doing it for six thousand years.”

“I had to do compressions to bring you back, Andy,” Nile says slowly, remembering the awful feeling of Andy with no breath, no pulse.

“I came back,” Andy insists, and Nile can see in her eyes how deeply she believes this. “I drowned. My heart stopped. I died. And I came back.”

Joe and Nicky exchange a look beside Nile, and then Nicky stands up. Joe seems to instinctively reach for him, but lets his hand drop.

Nicky takes his knife and holds it out to Andy, keeping that steady eye contact with her the whole time. She takes it and, before Nile can protest—she’s sensing a theme, with Andy’s recklessness here—Andy cuts her forearm.

It feels like her heart is in her throat, it feels like an eternity.

It heals.

“ _ Santa Maria Madre de Dio,”  _ Nicky murmurs, and Nile can’t help but nod in agreement.

“Why now?” Joe asks, leaning forward, although whether it’s towards Nicky or Andy, Nile can’t say.

Andy isn’t looking at them; she’s not even looking at her wound. “It’s not my time. Not yet. Not anymore.”

“You’re mortal?” Quynh asks, the first words she’s spoken since Andy’s name.

“Was,” Andy murmurs. “But I’m not leaving you. You and me, until the end. And that’s a long time away.”

“Good,” Quynh mutters, fisting a hand into Andy’s shirt. She looks around the room then, seems to process them this time. “Nicolò. Yusuf. You pulled me out?”

“Yes,” Joe says simply. “That was us.”

She nods, then frowns. “You stabbed me.”

“You almost dragged Nicolò under.”

She tilts her head and watches Joe for a second, then shrugs before she turns to Nile. “You’re new.”

“My name is Nile.”

“She’s the reason we found you,” Andy murmurs. “She…  _ she  _ saved you.”

“Group effort,” Nile manages.

Quynh smiles. “It is nice to meet you.”

What is Nile supposed to say to that? _ I felt you drown probably a few hundred times? I’ve felt some of your pain? I’ve watched you most nights for months now? Are you as unstable as you felt down there? _

“You too,” she manages.


	5. Chapter Five

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> After the sea, they have to figure out what comes next.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hello all! I decided to push my posting schedule up to once a day, although that might result in weird late at night posts.
> 
> Warnings for this chapter: Some non-graphic violence against members of our crew, caused by members of the crew (everyone is physically fine after). Quynh is definitely psychologically a mess. Booker, also a psychological mess, gets exactly seven seconds of screen time here.
> 
> Thank you so much for reading. I hope you're enjoying this!e

Quynh seems worn out—understandable, really—and doesn’t have anything more to say, apparently. She turns her head into Andy’s neck and closes her eyes, and that seems to be their cue to go to sleep.

Nile spares half a thought for what must be the incredibly confused crew of this ship, and then decides that they’re a problem for future Nile. Or, if she’s really lucky, for Copley.

Ships don’t have beds—or even bunk rooms, really—big enough for five to sleep as close as they need, so they spread out right there, and hope none of the crew come by. Joe and Nicky each bar a door, and Andy rips pillows off the couch and rescues a few throw blankets, and they pile together onto the floor. Joe and Nicky curl up as usual within moments, with Nicky facing the door. Andy and Quynh take a little longer, apparently working things out. They end up with Quynh’s face pressed into Andy’s neck, arms holding her like a vice. Andy’s head rests on top of hers, and she makes eye contact with Nile for a moment, smiling softly, clearly disbelieving, before Nile smiles back and then rolls on her back.

“If this is a dream,” Andy murmurs, “feel free to leave me sleeping for a while. Forever. Whatever.”

She then makes a yelping noise, and Nile looks over to see that Quynh seems to have bitten her. The bruise heals immediately, but the soft look on Andy’s face doesn’t go away.

For once, it’s not Nile’s own nightmare that wakes up. She wakes up to screaming, scrambling to get herself upright. Nicky is already upright and gun drawn, but he seems to have already processed the situation and is putting it away. 

Quynh is screaming and thrashing, and Andy has gone completely on top of her, trying to keep her flailing arms from hurting herself. She’s speaking to her in a language likely very old, whispering what sounds like the same phrase over and over and over again. Nile bites her lip and waits.

Quynh calms down with a shudder and a  _ heave _ , and Nile watches Andy gentle on top of her, taking Quynh in her arms. Quynh’s head falls back as she breathes deeply, and she continues talking.

Andy responds, and now she’s the agitated one. Nile gives Nicky and Joe a look, but judging by their faces, they don’t know what’s being said any more than she does. So Nile settles in and resolves to wait it out.

Their conversation is a rhythmic back and forth, and goes on for a while before Andy tilts her head and asks something that must be a question. Quynh shakes her head.

Andy gets a set to her face that Nile isn’t sure she likes, and she pulls a knife out and stabs Quynh.

“What the fuck—“

Andy holds up a hand, the one not cradling Quynh’s face as she bleeds out. The death is quick, at least, and soon enough Andy returns to using both hands to stroke Quynh’s face. “She hallucinated rescue before. She woke up and doesn’t believe it.”

“So you  _ killed _ her?”

“The hallucinations would...reset, with death, she said. So when I’m still here…”

Nile has to acknowledge the cold logic of it, even as it makes her a bit queasy. Judging by Andy’s face, Nile isn’t the only one to feel this way.

Quynh comes back with a gasp, latches onto Andy’s face and mutters her name before pulling her down and kissing her stupid.

Nile looks away, giving them their space. Nicky leans over to nudge her shoulder with a smirk, and she pulls together a smirk back.

Quynh lets Andy go, and Andy collapses into her back next to her. She asks her something, and Quynh nods.

“We’re good,” Andy translates. 

They remain  _ good _ through breakfast. Quynh eats the powdered eggs without complaint—they should have considered this last night, even if Quynh’s body died too fast to ever really get  _ hungry _ , she still hasn’t eaten in centuries—although with some clear curiosity.

She’s subdued, her movements slow and methodical when she bothers to make them. She clings onto Andy like Andy is her oxygen, and Andy clearly does not mind at all, eating one-handed and when she remembers to, which isn’t that often.

Nile nudges her eggs closer to her. “Just because you’re immortal again doesn’t mean you can stop eating.”

Andy picks up another forkful and eats it, still watching Quynh and not the food.

“Nile,” Quynh says slowly. “How long have you been with us?”

It’s the first thing Quynh has said in English all day. She clearly can speak the language, but probably will only do so when she’s reminded that Nile doesn’t speak much else. It’s probably what the others all do, honestly, but they’re better at disguising it.

Nile thinks of all the language lessons she has in her future, and how it still won’t help her catch up. Not if Andy and Quynh have been speaking a language Nicky and Joe don’t even understand.

Then again, maybe there are things she’s better not knowing.

“Five months,” she says, then thinks back. “Almost six.”

“That short?” She asks Andy.

Andy shrugs. “We’ve had a…eventful few months. And Nile, Nile’s the reason we found you. We’re thankful for her every day.” It’s possibly the most honest, naked emotions Nile’s heard from Andy, with few possible exceptions. 

Quynh smiles at Nile. It’s too wide and feels forced, but Nile tries to smile back. “Thank you, then.”

Nile hopes they can separate long enough for a shower. She feels grimy and she’s the only one who didn’t end up in the ocean last night. She can’t imagine how the others feel, crusted with salt still.

She suggests it and gets nods. Joe and Nicky go first, and are back ten minutes later, clean and once again in fresh clothes. Holding hands, Nile notices, which isn’t entirely uncommon but also isn’t something they do every day, and Nile honestly doesn’t know if it’s because they’re happy or still not over the fear of last night. Maybe both.

Nile insists Andy and Quynh go next—they’d both been in the sea—and waits her turn. “She seems…better than I thought,” she ventures.

Joe and Nicky look at the door, each other, and then her. Nicky nods, face solemn, lips thin. “Yes. I see that.”

Joe frowns. “What happens now will happen.”

“And Andy…”

Both of them manage small smiles at that. “ _ That _ I never expected to happen. Then again…” Nicky shrugs. “It is not that we didn’t believe Andy and Quynh, when they told us about Lykon. But Lykon died so long before us. And we’ve been alive a thousand years, almost. Andy over six, and Quynh almost four. You can see why it didn’t make an impression. Until Andy became mortal.”

“It’s not her time, love,” Joe says, jostling Nicky’s shoulder. “And it won’t be ours for a long time to come.”

The door opens then, Andy and Quynh back, Quynh’s eyes wide but still relatively calm, and the conversation ceases.

The crew doesn’t ask any questions. Copley possibly put the fear of the CIA into them, a bold move considering he doesn’t work for them anymore. Either way, Nile doesn’t care as long as they’re left alone.

Quynh works her way through Andy’s wardrobe, through Nile’s cellphone, through electric lights and running water. She listens patiently to stories of their time separated. And she never asks for anything.

She also sleeps worse than Nile ever has, waking up with nightmares every night. Sometimes she’s so convinced that this world isn’t real that Andy kills her, which Andy does with grim determination and a look in her eyes so painful that Nile aches for her.

When she’s not having debilitating night terrors, Quynh vacillates between curious and so still it’s a little frightening. Joe, Nicky, and Nile edge around her at times like that, but she never lets Andy go.

They’re back on land quickly enough, which is probably good—they’re all tired of the ship and leery of being at sea, of course—but that immediately lands them in the problem that Quynh hasn’t seen people or any semblance of society since the sixteenth century.

People get close to her and Quynh tenses, reaches for a weapon that is not there. The world must be faster, louder, more aggressively in-your-face then the one Quynh left, because advertising and speeding cars and trains can make her jump and prepare to fight. 

Andy holds her hand, and they keep moving.

They end up in Germany, just outside Munich. The house they rent is private enough that at least Quynh isn’t being confronted by the world every moment. At least they can break things to her slowly.

There are three bedrooms at this place, but that doesn’t do anything for the nightmares. Most nights it’s Quynh, but Nile gets her turns too. So does everyone else.

Andy wakes up every time Quynh does, if she ever even slept at all. Nicky is up in a heartbeat, and most of the time, Quynh is so loud that Nile and Joe are awake too.

They end up outside more often than not. Something about being able to see the sky seems to help Quynh a bit, and none of them are going to argue it. It’s more than helped Nile too, after all. 

Nicky gets out the knives one time and manages a little smirk—unless she’s missed the mark, she doesn’t think he’s had a great night either, although he hasn’t mentioned his own nightmares tonight—and hands them to Quynh.

“Watch and learn,” he murmurs, stepping back to Nile’s side. “Quynh taught me everything I know.”

“Quynh can hit the eye of a fly,” Joe agrees. His arm makes its way around Nicky’s waist, tugging him slightly closer. 

Quynh hasn’t lost the skills in the intervening years, clearly. She smiles when she’s done, turning to Nicky. “Is this what you do when you can’t sleep?”

“Sometimes.”

Nile shrugs. “It helps me.”

Quynh studies the target, tilting her head. “I can see why. Show me.”

Without ever speaking about it, Joe, Nicky, and Nile all begin a language of secret glances to determine who is on duty to watch Andy and Quynh. It’s not that they don’t trust them, but Nile will  _ never _ forget how unstable Quynh felt—rightfully so, of course, but not something she wants near people—and they’ve all agreed to keep a close eye.

At any rate, it feels like the first time that Nile is in on the secret looks and languages they all have with each other, and this might be a few sentences compared to their entire languages, but she has to start somewhere.

Today they all look at each other when Andy announces they need to buy Quynh new clothes, and Nicky tilts his head just slightly to acknowledge it’s his turn (Nile had taken grocery shopping two days before, an excruciating experience, as Quynh couldn’t even identify most of the foods, and was more than overwhelmed with the choices). Nicky starts going on about how he needs new pants, so Quynh and Andy invite him along.

That leaves Joe and Nile free, after Joe kisses Nicky goodbye and sends the three of them off. He turns to grin at her. “What’re we going to do today?”

Half of Nile wants to say  _ go the hell to sleep _ , but she hasn’t spent that much time with just Joe lately. 

So they take the second car Nicky picked up—Nile hasn’t quite worked up the courage to ask if it’s stolen yet, but either way it’s a piece of shit—and go into Munich. Joe takes her to the Old Picture Gallery, and enters with something approaching glee that Nile doesn’t quite understand. Sure, art is great. She likes art, she knows Joe does too, but he seems too excited for this to be some casual outing.

Until they get to the section that has 14th century Italian art, because Nile would have to be absolutely blind to not see it. “That…is Nicky,” she manages. It very obviously is. The artist even got the light sparkle to his eye when he’s in on some sort of joke.

“Mhm.”

She turns to him. “And did you all do stuff like this a lot?”

“Andy’s staying off the radar thing meant something very different a few hundred years ago,” Joe merely says. “As long as you didn’t actively die in front of them and come back to life, we were pretty much fine.”

She raises an eyebrow. “How many Nicky’s am I going to see here?”

Joe tilts his head and bites his lip, as if he’s counting. “At least five or six.”

“Any others?”

“I’m in one or two. I painted four of these, but you won’t see my name on them. And Andy is in two, but they’re not the Italian ones.”

Well. That’s…something. “What’ll you give me if I can find them all?”

Joe raises an eyebrow, but there’s a smirk already curling around his lips. “I’m not the betting man, Nile. You’ll have to go to my Nico if you want that sort of thing.”

“Don’t bullshit me,” she says, nudging his shoulder.

“If you can find them all? Including the ones I painted?” He muses, looking around for a second. “I’ll buy you a fancy Smartphone like you want.”

“That’s like eight hundred bucks.”

“I’m very old, Nile. I’ve accumulated the money. And Nicky has lost us more on stupid bets in the past, so he has no room to judge. What do you say?”

Nile takes his hand and shakes. “Deal.”   
  


Finding Nicky is so easy, and Nile has a strong hunch at least one of those Nicky paintings is by Joe, although she can’t tell which yet. The painting of Joe is easy to find, and Nile smirks at the expression on his face, like he has some great secret neither the artist nor viewer will ever know. Andy is a little harder—one of the paintings she’s disguised herself as a man, and in another she’s in the background, so Nile really thinks Joe is cheating to mention it at all—but she gets all of them.

So she goes back and looks at the Nicky paintings again, trying to figure out which one is by Joe. Joe just follows her, slightly bemused— “It’s okay if you don’t know, Nile, really” —but Nile keeps staring at old paintings of Nicky.

She has to admit it’s more of a hunch than anything, but she looks into the eyes of all the painted Nicky’s. The first one she saw, like Nicky is laughing at some sort of joke, stands out to her. Wordlessly, she points to it, then points to another Nicky with the curve of his mouth  _ just _ right, like the artist had seen it for hundreds of years, in every form.

The other three Joe paintings are a little harder, but now Nile has a grasp on his style. They’re all over the building, of course, and Nile half wishes she had a fitbit so she could figure out how many steps she’s gotten tracking back and forth in this museum over and over again. She points them out as they move, across countries and centuries, and Joe has this smirk that builds and builds as they move.

“So, lunch before or after we get the phone?”

Nile considers. A phone would be nice, but honestly, it’s not a priority. “Where’s good for lunch?”

The food is good, and Nile probably enjoys the stories Joe tells her behind each painting even more.

“So seriously, for hundreds of years, you just…went around painting Nicky? No secrecy whatsoever?”

“I still paint Nicky. Everyone, really, sometimes. I just have to be slightly more careful with my things these days. Not that…I can show you some more modern Nicky, if we go to New York.”

She blinks at him. “Y'all talk about secrecy a lot for people who do absolutely  _ nothing _ to keep their secret.”

Joe just smiles, and then steals a bite right off her plate. “We do plenty to keep our secret. Yes, someone might look through history and see a somewhat similar man in paintings, but people don’t look for things like that. Why would they?” He tries for another bite, and Nile bats his fork away. “Besides, I like recording the beautiful moments. There are things I don’t want to forget.”

“And when they end up in museums?”

He shrugs, and this time successfully snags another bite, despite his own plate still being half full. “Then other people can experience them with us, in some way. That’s nice, isn’t it?”

Nile can’t help but smile. “Tell me about some other paintings, then. Some I can go and see later.”

“Of course. But only if I can have another bite.”

“You should have ordered it if you wanted it so badly,” she grumbles, but allows him to take more.

“What would the fun in that be? Now, do you want some of mine, or do you just want the story?”

They’ve all started to sleep like Andy: whenever and wherever they can grab a few minutes. Nile is relatively sure she hasn’t gotten a REM cycle in almost a month. Her aim with the throwing knives improves, and Quynh does show her how to shoot a bow, which is possibly not the best idea in the suburban area they’re in. Quynh doesn’t seem to understand suburban sprawl though, or that most people don’t casually keep and practice with weapons of war anymore.

One night post-nightmare, they end up outside, sitting in the yard, letting the full moon illuminate them. It isn’t a good night, Nile knows. Nicky and Joe have dark circles under their eyes, and Nile herself woke up from a nightmare about her brother in Quynh’s coffin.

Quynh sits on Andy’s lap, and Andy holds her close. “The other one,” she murmurs. 

Even in the weak moonlight, Nile can see everyone tense. “His name is Booker,” Andy seems to remind her. They’ve clearly had this conversation. “Sébastien. Did you dream about him?”

“He is…he is very alone.”

“A prison of his own making,” Nicky says, not looking directly at her. He doesn’t sound particularly harsh, but Nile knows he’s not exactly welcoming to further conversation, either.

“He needs help. We’re supposed to be family.”

Joe snorts. “Some family.” He learns a little further into Nicky.

“Does family abandon their own?” Nile doesn’t think she imagines Andy’s twitch and shudder.

Joe tenses up. “It’s not that straightforward, Quynh.”

She tilts her head and looks at him for a long minute. “Maybe not,” she concedes. “It’s been…a long time since I remembered things could be complicated. I’m not sure I fully understand it at all anymore.” They all sit uneasily with that for a moment, before Quynh stretches. “I would like to meet him. I am not dreaming of him for a hundred years.”

Everyone is silent for a minute, but Andy eventually nods. “I’ll go with you.”

They all end up in the car, and it’s tight for five, but that’s the least of Nile’s concerns. She’s nodded off against Quynh’s shoulder four times, but she’s always woken within minutes. 

Honestly, she’s so tired coffee doesn’t make a bit of difference anymore, and she’s started seeing double if she doesn’t focus. They’re going to have to figure this out sooner rather than later.

Quynh and Andy are both passed out, Quynh in the middle and Andy on the other side. Quynh seems asleep for now, and Andy is doing her usual act of waking up every few moments to check, then falling immediately back to sleep in a way that has Nile jealous.

Joe’s driving and Nicky’s navigating, which is interesting because Nile knows they only came reluctantly. They clearly don’t want to say no to Quynh, but they also aren’t ready to be near Booker yet.

Which is fair enough. Six months must really feel like the blink of an eye to them. They’ve been dealing with a lot of things—Quynh, healing after Merrick’s lab, Nile herself—and haven’t been able to figure out how to begin healing from what Booker did yet.

But they’re in the car at least. Whether or not they go all the way to Booker with them is another story.

Nicky makes eye contact with her through the mirror. “Hungry?”

Probably, although she’s tired enough it’s a little hard to tell. Still, she nods anyways.

Quynh and Andy wake up at the drive-through, and Quynh gets to experience the joy of McDonalds, and Nile gets to laugh at the furrow in her brow while trying to parse the food.

Joe and Nicky stay at the hotel room they rented just for show—they’re clearly not planning on staying long. Nile, Quynh, and Andy make their way through Paris.

Nile isn’t sure why exactly she goes, to be honest. Part of her is worried about Quynh in a city as big as Paris, and she knows Andy can handle anything, but maybe not Quynh. Another part of her just wants to see Booker, see where he landed.

He’s not home, and Andy quickly picks the lock, and Nile remembers once again that she wants someone to show her how to do that. But for now, they break into Booker’s run down apartment.

Andy looks around and shakes her head. “Fucking Book,” she mutters. She moves deeper into the apartment, and Nile follows her.

And then they hear the lock open. She freezes, and oddly enough, Andy does the same, standing together in Booker’s shitty little bedroom, like kids caught red-handed.

Quynh clearly has no such issues. “Booker,” she murmurs from the other room. “It’s nice to finally meet you.”

“What the hell?”

Nile winces. Even from here, even from their short time knowing each other, she can tell he doesn’t sound good. Andy, for her part, is staring at the ground, something painful crossing her face.

“Don’t tell me you don’t recognize me.”

“Quynh. Of course…I…”

“Did you miss me getting out?”

“Don’t dream if you’re drunk,” he says. “Nile did it, huh?”

“Mhm, she did.”

At the mention of her own name, Nile gets the movement in her legs back. “Damn, Booker, you live like this?” She asks, walking back into the other room.

Booker jumps, physically jumps a bit. “What the hell.”

“Andy’s here too,” Nile says, thinking maybe it’d be best not to surprise him again. “How’ve you been?”

It seems polite to ask, but maybe it was downright offensive, because he sits at his own kitchen table—littered with random things, practically no space to eat—and puts his feet up, tilting his head. “Swell.”

“Book.”

“Boss,” Booker returns, pivoting his head to latch onto Andy. “Good to see you.”

She tilts her head at him, but then crosses the room to hug him, bending down while he leans up. “You too.”

Booker seems to have trouble letting her go. Touch-starved, probably, because it’s been six months and who else would he go to?

Nile slips out of the room, lets the low voices fade into the background, and pulls out her phone. She finds his printer’s wireless signal—of course Booker would own a printer and not, seemingly, an actual couch—and queues up a dozen articles to print the next time he turns it on.

Grief, depression, survivor’s guilt. A local group for those who’ve lost kids, those who suffer from survivor’s guilt, a local AA chapter.

Nile knows Booker isn’t about to get invited back to their group, and honestly, she’s not sure if she wants him. Not that she thinks he’ll betray the team on purpose again—he clearly regrets his choices, or at least the effects of his choices—but he’s absolutely a hot mess of a man that will do more harm than good.

But if he’s banished for a hundred years, he can do some work and get better while he’s hanging out here, even if he needs her help because he’s older than any modern ideas of therapy and mental health.

The most dangerous people are the ones who think they have nothing to lose, she remembers. Nile doesn’t want him to be  _ dangerous  _ when he does come back.

She rejoins the others. Andy’s eyes catch hers but Nile just shrugs. 

“Nice to meet you, Booker,” Quynh says. “I’ll see you.”

“In ninety-nine and a half years, yeah, I know.”

Andy raises an eyebrow. “Got a pen?”

Booker digs around on the table and then hands her one, and she reaches down and scribbles something on a paper napkin, likely from take out, not entirely clean. “Once a month, send me an update,” she says. “I’ll email you back. And if you’re in trouble…I’ll come for you.”

Booker swallows. “That’s very generous, Boss.”

She cuffs him in the shoulder. “You’re family, Book. Even if you do dumbass things, even if it’s better for everyone to spend this time apart. That doesn’t change.”

“Have I said I’m sorry?” He asks, voice a little hoarse.

“To me.”

“Tell them, if they want to hear it.”

Andy looks him in the eye for a long moment, then nods. “Yeah. I can do that.” She pulls his head in for a second, a weird sort of hug, then lets him go.

“Will I see you again?” He asks, voice small and body impossibly still, and Nile almost calls out when she realizes they didn’t tell him.

Andy gives a small smile. “Have a little faith, Book.”

And then she turns to leave.

Quynh and Nile follow her out. “Why didn’t you tell him?” Nile asks, outside the door to the building.

Andy shrugs. “I still haven’t forgiven him, Nile.”

Nile almost opens her mouth to argue that it’s cruel, to make Booker think that was possibly their last goodbye, but she keeps her mouth shut. It’s Andy’s business, not hers. She turns to Quynh instead. “You get what you need?”

Quynh tosses her head, her long hair flipping over her shoulder. She looks almost at ease, walking down the streets of Paris, dressed like a high-fashion modern woman, but she stands just a little too close to Andy’s side. “I met him. It’s enough.”

Andy leans into her, just a little bit. “Don’t judge him for his worst moments.”

“I will until he proves better.”

Andy just laughs softly, like Quynh told a joke, and for all Nile knows, maybe she has. Quynh turns to her. “Do you speak French, Nile?”

“Only a little bit.”

Quynh tilts her head. “I fear my French is horrifically out of date. We can practice together.”

They don’t get much time for that, which is a shame. Nile’s always wanted to really see Paris. But she gets why they might not want to stay in Booker’s new city.

They don’t go back to Germany, either, instead driving for days, camping at night in a tent she honestly cannot say when they acquired, making their way to the Turkish countryside.

Quynh seems to be reminiscing, although Nile can’t understand a word she’s saying. Andy can, though, and is contributing to the story at regular intervals. They smile at each other, and she looks to Nicky and Joe around their fire, and they just smile back at her, Nicky offering a small shrug.

They eat out of convenience stores and gas stations and even, on one memorable night, a rabbit Andy brings them, clearly freshly killed.

A rabbit which Nile recoiled from—she likes her food supermarket packaged, thank you—and Quynh just tilted her head at, and then insulted the cleanliness of Andromache’s kill, making Andy laugh.

They make it to Turkey, more or less in one piece.

There’s swords, here. There’s an old house—cottage, really, Nile thinks—with a pile of swords by the door. “So who’s going to teach me?” She asks, picking one up at random.

It’s horrifically heavy and awkward, and Quynh laughs at her. Nile flushes, but Nicky and Joe go through the pile and find one that’ll work better for her.

“Let’s show you the basics,” Nicky murmurs, gesturing for her to lead the way outside while Joe finds them two more swords.

It turns out  _ the basics _ means sword care, means cleaning and sharpening blades. Nile  _ hhmphs _ , but she’s gets the point of good weapons care, so she follows along and does it, methodical, slow.

Then it’s all footwork, very different than holding a gun. Joe makes her practice footwork for hours.

This is what she anticipated when she came to stay with them, this type of drilling, of passing on of knowledge. It turns out Joe and Nicky are perfectly good drill sergeants, if perhaps a little too nice. Andy mostly stays out of the way, but she heckles Joe and Nicky in their technique periodically.

“If you can do it better, hop in,” Joe invites, a wide grin in place. Andy stands up deliberately from where she is and takes a recently sharpened blade, seemingly at random.

Nile swallows, hears  _ that woman has forgotten more ways to kill than entire armies will ever learn _ . It’s not fear she feels—she’s honestly not afraid of these people anymore, except maybe Quynh and even that is only sometimes—but it is a healthy sense of foreboding bubbling in her gut.

She tries to hold the sword like Nicky showed her.

“Best way to learn is to put it in practice,” Andy says, and  _ lunges _ .

The footwork helps, if only just. Nile blocks the blow and dodges, and tries to return only to be under attack again.

Andy’s strategy seems to be to be fast, to keep Nile on the defensive and moving back, until Nile can’t block anymore. Andy knocks her to the ground and holds the sword to her throat, and smiles.

She retracts the blade. “Next time,” Andy murmurs, then offers Nile a hand up.

Nile huffs and takes it. “You better believe it.”

She does not get Andy next time, or the time after or the time after. She does make progress though. She can defend herself longer, attempt to return the attack every once in a while. Joe even compliments her footwork once.

And on the twentieth fight—not that she’s counting or anything—she manages to get Andy. A scratch, really, a glancing blow that heals immediately, but it’s something.

Andy stops and smiles at her. “There we go.”

Nile doesn’t feel the flush of pride for very long, because Quynh hops up from where she’s watching and takes Andy’s sword. “My turn.”

“Are you implying you’re a better swordsman than me?” Andy asks, mostly joking. Quynh doesn’t answer.

She just stares straight into Nile’s soul, and Nile shivers at what she sees.

Because those, those are underwater eyes. Those are the eyes of Quynh at the bottom of the sea. 

Quynh lunges. Nile falls back and tries to block, successfully keeping herself from getting shish-kabobed. Nile vaguely remembers Joe calling Quynh a  _ pit viper in a fight _ and feels it in every inch of her bones, already having to devise how to handle the next attack.

It turns out  _ devise _ is the wrong strategy, and it’s more about reaction. She evens her breathing as best she can and starts letting instinct rule her, defending and trying to get under Quynh’s guard.

The flashes she gets of Quynh’s face are absolutely brutal, eyes blazing and seemingly not seeing Nile at all, but Nile can’t process that, just has to fight on.

She sets her stance and doesn’t let herself be moved, takes the absolutely bone-shaking blow and gets under Quynh’s guard.

And that’s when Quynh loses it. She makes a sound that makes Nile’s stomach twist, and then Nile’s world goes dark.

She wakes up quick enough, and completely healed, her hand going to the wound and finding nothing but blood. Nicky helps her up.

Quynh and Andy are  _ gone _ .

“What the fuck?” Nile murmurs.

“You died.”

“Yes, I noticed,” she snaps, not in the mood to mess around. Nile hasn’t died since Merrick Pharmaceuticals, but she remembers the feeling. Right now, it’s sitting as a weird phantom ache, her body healed but her mind not fully accepting that yet. “What happened?”

Nicky’s face looks dark, and Joe, just over his shoulder, doesn’t look much better. “Wish I knew.”


	6. Chapter Six

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The shoe drops.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hello all!
> 
> Warnings here: Quynh is hella traumatized. There's quite a bit of violence. It's not told in a ton of explicit detail, but it is unignorably there.
> 
> The team splits up at one point. There's shouting? Discussion of colonial art theft? Just trying to cover my bases here.
> 
> I hope you enjoy!

Quynh and Andy don’t come back. Nile showers to get the blood and sweat off of her, and Joe and Nicky deal with getting her blood off the sword Quynh dropped, and they’re still not back.

Now clean, she pieces together the story while Nicky makes an attempt at lunch. Quynh stabbed her when she got close. Quynh seemed so  _ gone _ and Andy wrestled the sword from her and dragged her away. And now they’re gone.

They’re gone, and Nile can’t stop rubbing the place in her chest where a damn stab wound should be.

Joe stills her hand, the next time she reaches. “It’ll take time,” he says, squeezing and letting her get back to it.

She supposes Joe might know about being stabbed by someone supposed to care about you.

Nicky places food in front of her, then Joe, and they all eat their chicken sandwiches in contemplative silence.

Andy and Quynh aren’t back by nightfall, and they’re not back in the hours afterwards, either.

Joe takes one look at her when he starts making moves to go to bed and tilts his head. “Would you like to join us?”

She considers it. It’s embarrassing as  _ shit _ , to give in, to already admit she’s going to have nightmares bad enough to need this level of comfort. But on the other hand…maybe if she pre-loads on the comfort, she can skip the nightmare bit.

“Are you propositioning me?” she mutters, just to be contrary, and it feels like a victory when she makes Joe laugh, genuine and a little delighted.

She doesn’t avoid the nightmares, but Nicky just holds her close and Joe holds him close and they make it through the night.

Quynh and Andy don’t come back the next day either, and Nile starts pacing shortly after breakfast. She can’t help it. 

“Nile. They’re thousands of years old, they’re immortal. Literally no one is more equipped for survival than them.”

Nile opens her mouth, closes it. Doesn’t know how to voice her fears, doesn’t know how to say that maybe Quynh is as feral as she always feared, as she dreamed, and that Andy, who can handle anything, can’t handle Quynh.

“Let’s go. Sword practice,” Joe says when the pacing doesn’t stop.

She balks at that. “I…no.”

“You going to avoid swords now?”

“Forgive me, when one stabbed me through the fucking heart yesterday,” she mutters, clearly full of petulance.

“I don’t actually think it got your heart,” Nicky muses. “But Joe is right. Let’s go.”

Outside is an improvement, Nile realizes slowly. And Joe and Nicky keep it slow. Slow, but steady. Soothing, almost.

“Thank you.” It’s been almost two hours now, and she feels calmer.

Joe grins at her. “Anytime. Now. Lunch?”   
  


Andy and Quynh still aren’t back by bedtime. Nile sleeps on her own, but neither Joe nor Nicky complain when she wakes them in the middle of the night.

They return the next night, just as it’s getting dark, both of them with dark bags under their eyes and Andy with a grim set to her mouth.

“We have a job,” she announces as soon as she walks in. “We leave first thing.”

“Boss, what the fuck?” Joe asks.

“Joe—”

“It’s a valid question, Andromache,” Nicky interrupts.

“Copley called. People need us. Any more questions?”

Joe opens his mouth, then closes it. He sighs. “When are we leaving?”

“First light.”

Nile doesn’t sleep with Nicky and Joe that night. She knows no one would say anything, but it feels weird for Andy and Quynh to see her doing that.

She's not a child and they’re not her parents. Far from it. And she can’t have Andy and Quynh possibly thinking of her that way.

So she doesn’t sleep, and instead slips outside while everyone is getting ready to sleep. It’s still early enough, and the moon is bright. Nile closes her eyes and breathes deep, soaking in the night air.

“Do you have a minute?”

Nile jumps. Quynh moves as quietly as any of them, and Nile is very perceptive but she honestly had no idea that Quynh followed her outside.

“From what you all keep reminding me, I have a lot of minutes,” Nile says, and Quynh chuckles. It sounds a little painful, if Nile is being honest.

“I suppose that’s true,” she admits after a moment. “But not quite what I meant. Nile, I’d like to apologize to you.”

Nile thinks she suddenly has better, more stiff posture than she ever did during her military service. “It’s okay.”

It is. It has to be. Quynh is…hurt and unbalanced, and probably no one here understands that better than Nile, because they know Quynh, but she’s  _ felt _ the inside of her head. And even with that, Nile has only scratched the surface, can’t begin to imagine what’s underneath it all, what’s still lingering inside Quynh. What might be there forever, honestly.

But Quynh shakes her head. “It is not,” she argues. “I just…” She sighs. “Family should not hurt family, and I know we do not know each other well yet. Not as well as I know Nicolò and Yusuf and of course, Andromache.” Something wry and a little painful crosses her face, and Nile half wants to reach out to her, even as she’s convinced she’d be stabbed. “Not that I know them that well anymore, either.”

“Anyone would understand you being a little overwhelmed, Quynh.”

Quynh’s laugh is grating along Nile’s nerves, making something bright and painful flash behind her eye. “Overwhelmed. Yes. Perhaps that is what I am.”

Quynh looks off into the distance. “I am well aware that I am not who I was when I went into the sea, Nile.”

“No one would be.”

“Mmm. Yes. I won’t lie. I was violent and quick with a blade. We were warriors. I died a warrior’s death my first and thousandth time. But this…” She shakes her head. “You hurt Andromache. A scratch. Meaningless, really. It healed before she blinked. But I…” She shudders. “I told you, I don’t understand when things are  _ complicated _ that well anymore. Andromache was hurt. That was all I could see. There was nothing else. And then you attacked me, and  _ that _ was all I could see. The world is small now, Nile.” She’s quiet for a moment, and then in the barest whisper, “I’m different, Nile. I wasn’t like this, before.”

“They’re not the same either.”

Quynh sighs. “Yes, yes. Time changes us all. But they’ve never stabbed you.”

Nile tilts her head. “Andy shot me in the head once.”

And Quynh actually manages something approximating a smile, less like the jagged edges of glass than earlier. “And I’m sure she won’t do it again.”

“I don’t know about that.”

Quynh keeps smiling, standing outside and studying the night sky with her. “Will you forgive me?”

Nile hesitates a second, and her hand betrays her and moves to where the sword entered. “I’m sure I will.”

Quynh nods, accepting that. “Wise, to hold judgement,” she murmurs. “And I appreciate your honesty.” She pauses for a moment, and then looks at Nile directly. “Will you come in with me? Or would you like me to stay here?”

Nile ends up following her in, and while she doesn’t sleep well, it does feel like a weight has been taken off of her.

She wakes to find Quynh on the couch, already waking up, and Andy up and moving, while Nicky coaxes Joe upright, and for just a moment, there’s something akin to peace inside of her.

The peace doesn’t last. They spend most of the day on a flight that Nile still isn’t sure won’t fall out of the sky, then catch a helicopter that seems to only pick them up as a favor and only drops them marginally closer, and then end up having to rent a  _ car _ for the last hundred or so miles.

Nile is damn tired, and she could use a hotel and room service and a shower, but they’re all armed to the teeth and geared up for what feels like war.

Joe had laughed coldly when he’d read the mission brief that morning. “Either Copley thinks we’re very dumb, or the universe has a strange sense of humor.”

“What? Why?”

“How Copley found us the first time,” Joe says absently, handing the tablet to Nicky. “Pretended some kids needed rescuing.”

“And obviously, we fell for it,” Nicky murmurs as he reads.

Quynh snorts. “Because you have never changed.”

“Not that much.”

Andy clears her throat loudly. “It’s real,” she says. “So, are we going to rescue those kids?”

Obviously they are, so here they are, armed and ready to take down anyone in their way to get to those kids.

Nile wonders how they only end up in America for jobs.

Maybe it’s just that she’s the only American, maybe it’s that the others are trying to support her by keeping her away from anything too close to him unless it’s absolutely necessary. Maybe America is just a stinking shithole sometimes, full of problems that come in the variety that they solve.

So they end up just outside of Washington DC, and Nile hopes to God that no cop drives this quiet street to see the guns.

They’d come back, yes, but it would be a disaster.

Nicky does not go off to find a sniper perch. Andy most definitely does not relegate herself to a support role. Instead, armed to the teeth, they all prepare to breach.

Nile’s the only one without a sword. She can admit she’s nowhere near as good as them, but she still thinks she’s liable to be better than any asshole they run into. 

Apparently now that Andy can’t die, the plan of attack is more “use your body as a blunt instrument” than anything else. Nile’s sort of fine with it, but she definitely dies once and probably mostly dies a second time after breach. The deaths are quick, though. The type where she knows she goes down, but doesn’t really remember dying, and she wakes up quick enough it’s almost just like blinking very slowly.

There’s still blood in her mouth and definitely plenty staining her shirt. Andy looks her over and smirks as they turn the corner into the basement, the upstairs now free of targets. “Least it’s not a headshot.”

“Small mercies,” Nile mumbles, and spits out the last of the blood she was coughing up a few minutes ago.

Nile vividly remembers Andy’s whole thing about going first. Which is why she’s surprised when Quynh doesn’t even wait for them all to get into position and just barges through, gun long since discarded and sword in hand.

“Jesus Christ,” Nile murmurs, stunned for a moment at Quynh ripping through people. Nile knows she herself just killed a handful of people upstairs, but this is—

Quynh removes an entire head and barely seems to notice it, and Nile winces, both at the brutality, and how do you  _ not notice _ applying that much force?

Nile manages to make herself move, but Quynh isn’t leaving her much to do. She works her way over corpses to the back, where there’s a legitimate metal cage, floor to ceiling, with seven kids huddled together.

They’re filthy and look both tired and hungry, but more than anything, they look absolutely  _ terrified _ . Nile kneels down and tries to hush them, tries to smile at them, tries to do everything the Marines taught her to get kids to trust her—

It didn’t work then and it doesn’t work now. Not when the reality is so different.

“Quynh, that’s  _ enough _ ,” Andy says, voice firm. She steps closer to Quynh, hand outstretched. “We need to get these kids clear. Call the authorities.”

Quynh’s face is split into a snarl. “Don’t tell me that, Andromache. Not when…look what they did.” She drives the tip of her sword into the shoulder of one who isn’t quite dead yet, triggering a scream that makes the children flinch away from Nile.

“I know,” Andy says, stepping closer still, her axe at her side, her other hand empty and open. “I know, Quynh. Don’t make the kids watch more.”

Nile’s given up on distracting the kids. 

Quynh drops her sword as Andy steps closer again, but goes to her knees and pulls out a knife, holding it to the man’s throat. “I don’t like cages,” she tells him, like she’s asking him for a glass of water or something.

He gasps, and honestly, he looks pretty rough. He might not know what’s happening anymore.

Quynh cuts into his collarbone, deep enough to hurt but not kill. Nile looks away, back at the kids, who are all watching Quynh.

“I can put you in a cage,” Quynh says, almost conversationally. “You’d deserve it.” She drives the knife into the meat of his shoulder to emphasize her point.

“Enough of this,” Nicky snaps, and goes to drag Quynh away.

Nile will never know if she was startled or just that angry, but the knife ends up in Nicky’s neck, which means the children’s and Joe’s screams compete to be heard.

Nile takes a deep, shaky breath. “It’s alright, alright,” she murmurs to the kids. “He’ll be fine, he’s had worse.”

She watches Andy drag Quynh out of the room from the corner of her eye, but doesn’t pay them much attention. “We’ll have you out of here in a second.”

She hears Nicky gasp back to life and hears him and Joe exchange what seem to be tense words, and then she’s presented with a set of keys they must have pulled off a corpse.

“I’ll call the police,” Joe says softly.

Nicky sits on his ass in front of the cage, ignoring the blood still coating his skin, and summons up his best smile for the children, trying to summon them out to him.

Nile and Nicky do their best to patch up the children, but most of them need food and sleep and soft beds, and if there’s anything more serious wrong, these children definitely aren’t sharing with them.

Joe and Nicky and Nile each carry one out, and the other four, slightly older, follow them out in a solemn line. Nile can already hear the sirens, but they’re almost drowned out by Andy and Quynh shouting at each other.

They have an audience. They would anyways, with the shooting and the death, but the people seem pervasively drawn to Andy and Quynh’s fighting, even if there’s no way they can understand it.

She sees Nicky wince, though, and makes a mental note to ask what the hell is going on after.

“Right,” she says loudly, setting the child she’s been holding onto the decrepit looking porch swing. “We need to get a move on.”

Andy gives her half a look, all exasperation, but she nods once and begins walking, even as the argument with Quynh doesn’t end.

Nicky and Joe murmur to the kids, tell them to be good, tell them to wait just a moment, and then all five of them disappear from the watchful eyes of the neighbors. Nile doesn’t feel great about leaving the kids. But the police are on their way, and the neighbors are out on droves, and she can’t exactly stick around.

Nicky and Joe flank her. “Quynh’s argument is that humans deserve it,” Nicky murmurs. “Because of the evil they do.”

Nile winces. “She has been…you know. Handling things really well.”

Joe nods. “Too well. Yes.”

Nicky winces this time. “Quynh is accusing Andy of enabling evil men.”

“Quynh seems to see it very much in black and white,” Joe adds.

“Should we be listening to them?”

Joe shrugs. “If Andy didn’t want us listening, she wouldn’t have started an argument in Greek.”

So Nile follows along back to their car, and it’s probably a testament to how tied up police are over the pile of bodies that they don’t attempt to track them down. It’s not like they’re hiding, with an argument that loud.

They reach the car but Andy’s stopped dead. “We’re not coming.”

Joe huffs. “Boss. Get in the damn car.”

Andy shakes her head. “Not this time, Joe. Quynh and I…we have some things to work out.”

Nile looks at Andy. Even in the mostly-dark of the street, she can see her exhaustion, the slump of her shoulders, the tension around her eyes. Wonders if Andy even knows what she’s asking for right now.

Quynh says something Nile can’t understand, but she doesn’t need to speak the language to hear how angry it is.

“I’ll call you,” Andy continues as if she hadn’t heard. “For now, let’s plan three months. Safehouse Tango.”   


Joe huffs again. “Andy, don’t get into something you can’t get out of.”

“Have I ever?” Andy asks with a raised eyebrow. “Besides, Quynh is…”

“Don’t talk about me like I’m not here,” Quynh demands, in English once more, and then storms off down the road.

Without waiting for any more confirmation from them, Andy takes off after her, leaving the three of them at the car.

“Well, fuck,” Nicky says, before sliding into the driver’s seat and starting the engine.

They don’t go after Quynh and Andy, even though they could have easily overtaken them in the car. Instead, Nicky drives them to the hotel and valets the car while Joe deals with check-in.

They stumble into the room and silently move off to shower, clean up the blood and put on fresh clothes.

Nile gets back to the couch before them, and she sits there with her hands knotted together between her knees. “What next?”

Joe tilts his head at her. “Next, we keep moving on,” he promises. “It’ll be fine, Nile.”

“Should we be worried?”

“About Andy?” Nicky asks. “She can take care of herself.”

Nile understands that. She understands where their unflappable faith in Andy comes from. But she can’t help but continue to think that there’s a huge difference between Andy handling a normal threat and Andy handling a threat that is Quynh.

“We knew things with Quynh were too good,” Joe points out. “So. They’ll work it out. In the meantime, we can go wherever we want, Nile.”

Nile shakes her head. “They’ll  _ work it out _ ? Quynh just wants to  _ kill _ people. She stabbed me the other day. She killed Nicky today. And Andy looks like anything could break her right now.”

They exchange a look. “It will not break Andromache,” Nicky assures her. “Six thousand years have not done that yet.”

“If something could, it would be Quynh,” Nile argues.

“True,” Joe acknowledges. “But Nile, I know you’ve never known Andy when she had Quynh, before this. But they are at their  _ best _ together. Andy was willing to make the last act of her very long life getting Quynh back. Perhaps they’ve changed too much to be good for each other anymore. But I doubt it. We need to give them time to heal. And we’ll take care of ourselves during that. Give them something to come back to.”

“But for now, we should go to bed. Get some sleep,” Nicky interrupts, standing like he will crawl into bed right now, even though he and Joe both put jeans back on after their shower. “Come on, Nile.”

She follows him.

Two days later they leave the US and travel to Lagos. Nicky rents them a hotel room while Joe shows her around, and Nile at least feels some of the tension leave her, even if she can’t forget it all.

“You know, it’d be nice to still have the dreams,” she muses at breakfast the next day, after a restless but not otherwise terrible night.

Joe raises an eyebrow at her. “I thought they were torture.”

“But I’d at least know they were okay now.”

They give her impossibly soft looks. “Too kind,” Nicky murmurs, passing his hand over hers briefly before putting more food on her plate.

It’s three days of fretting and worrying before Joe finally drops his laptop in front of her. “Would you like to take a job?”

She raises an eyebrow. “You really think we can do a job just the three of us? Won’t Andy be pissed?”

“First of all, Andy doesn’t get a say in what we do when she isn’t here,” Joe says, ticking off points on his fingers. “Second, not all jobs are the same, Nile. Not every job involves quite as many guns.”

Nile stares at the laptop for a minute, then nods. She’s in.

It turns out, Joe and Nicky have a not inconsequential side hustle in liberating stolen historical artifacts and returning them to their rightful home. It had started after World War Two— “stolen Nazi art,” Nicky had sniffed, and Nile had just nodded—but they’d taken a look at museums and really comprehended how much colonialism had robbed people of, and they’d made a hobby of liberating and returning things when they could.

“Plus,” Joe says cheerfully, like they aren’t looking at schematics for one of the biggest museums in the world, “it makes sure we keep up on the latest technology.”

Nicky nods absently. “You miss a motion sensor once and you do not make the same mistake again.”

“We had to go out the window,” Joe stage whispers to her.

“On the seventh floor,” Nicky adds, and Nile winces appropriately.

They enter Britain again via a boat that Nile tries not to think too hard about, and then Nicky rents them a car.

“So. What other types of jobs do we do?” Nile asks in the rental car. “Since it’s not all guns blazing?”

“Sometimes it is guns blazing. Sometimes we perform search and rescue in disaster zones. Sometimes we join political rebellions. We’ve spent years helping people flee oppressive governments before,” Nicky says.

“And sometimes we get normal jobs.”

Nile’s head turns at that. “We can do that?”

The car is silent for a second. “It’s harder than it used to be,” Joe admits. “With social media and the internet and security cameras that log out every move. It used to be, we could stay somewhere for five, ten, maybe fifteen years before people started questioning why we didn’t age. As long as we agreed on our backstory and didn’t draw too much attention to ourselves, we were fine.”

“It can still be done today,” Nicky says. “Precautions must be taken, of course. The time you have might be shorter. But it can be done.”

Nile hums. “How about college?”

Joe snorts. “Anyone can go to college,” he says. “And in this day and age, it’s even easier for people like us. Everyone expects you to be a little weird.”

“Do you want to go to college, Nile?”

Nile makes a humming noise again. Yes. Probably. She did want to, when she was overseas. Somedays, it felt like that was the thing that kept her over there more than anything. That they’d pay for her to go to school later.

Now there’s piles of money and even more piles of valuable art and antiques lying around in banks and caves and apparently some of that money is  _ hers _ . She can go to school. Hell, she’s in Europe now anyways. Doesn’t most of Europe have affordable colleges?

“You can think about it,” Joe says. “But know you have the option. You can go a million times, if you want. Become the most educated person in human history, not that they’ll ever know it. It’s all available to you.”

“But what about…all this?”

The silence is heavy for a few seconds, and the two men exchange a long look. “The world is difficult,” Nicky concedes. “Not that it ever wasn’t, but at least when we were young, you simply did not hear about tragedies halfway across the globe. Not in time to help, anyways. Now, news is instant and humans are particularly good at killing each other. But it’s not all on your shoulders, Nile.”

Nile raises an eyebrow, because she’s heard Nicky’s  _ we can do some good _ speech before. “It’s not,” he insists.

“And there’s more ways to do good than with a gun or sword,” Joe continues. “Bringing art to the world is good. Being a doctor brings good. Literature, science. It’s all good.”

Nicky hums, his own contemplation now. “We don’t do more good than normal people, Nile,” he says. “All of that is good. Everyone does good. We just…live longer, have more chances. More choices for doing good.”

Joe’s eyes crinkle up as he smiles. “And you call me the romantic,” he murmurs, kissing Nicky’s cheek, and Nile can’t help but smile, even if their conversation is completely derailed from there.

The British Museum is so overwhelmingly  _ huge _ . Nile could spend a week just walking around, taking it all in.

That is, if she wasn’t very cognizant of the amount of stolen art littered around the place.

Most of it, Joe had told her at the hotel last night, working himself up to something approximating anger the longer she and Nicky let him go. Most of it was stolen from different places, and now presented like the British had any claim to it. Nicky had then mentioned the Louvre, and Joe had jabbed a finger in the air, emphasizing the French, the Spanish, and the Americans being no better. 

And then Nicky had to go and egg him on further, and suddenly the conversation was no longer in English at all.

“Speaking of college,” Nicky murmurs in her ear, watching Joe rant still, “You can study this stuff, you know? Joe has a PhD in this.”

“In stolen art?”

“Mhm. I had to stop him from writing his dissertation about art we’d stolen back and returned.  _ Twice _ .”

Nile smiles and watches even though she can’t understand the rant, and settles back into the couch.

But now she’s at the museum and absolutely aware that many things around her are stolen. 

Some are big. The Elgin Marbles can’t exactly be slipped under her jacket. But Joe seems to have a target in mind, and nods for her to follow him while Nicky breaks off, already speaking loudly.

Nicky’s very loud, frustrated Italian tourist routine gives them some space around the artifact Joe has singled out. With some quick work Nile really wishes he would explain, he has the case open and is handing Nile a plaque.

Nile gapes at the item in her arms. “This is…older than you.”

“Yes. That’s why you’re wearing gloves.”

Nile can’t stop gaping at him—she is wearing gloves, but her bare forearms are touching the plaque, a hazard of carrying its bulky weight—and Joe just rolls his eyes.

“So…what’s the next step?”

Without answering, Joe just throws his jacket over her front, obscuring the plaque but not the shape of it. “Come on. This can’t work.”

“First rule. Walk with confidence, and you’ll be fine,” Joe murmurs, already walking away and expecting her to keep pace. 

“That  _ cannot _ be enough.”

“Yeah, well. Nicky’s helping.” Joe turns sharply around the corner to a side exit, which immediately sets off a fire alarm. “Keep walking,” he says.

“We’re going to get caught,” she says, but she keeps up the pace.

“Don’t be suspicious,” Joe says, and Nile looks over sharply to see the twinkle in his eyes.

“You and Nicky are  _ assholes _ ,” she hisses, but doesn’t stop.

“You’re only finding that out now?”

Nicky meets them back at the hotel, a small smile in place. “Good timing,” he murmurs after leaning down to kiss Joe in greeting. “I was running out of things to complain about.”

Nile can’t quite suppress her giggle. “This is what you two do for fun?”

They both turn to her and laugh right back, and Nile almost feels normal, even with the priceless plaque on the coffee table.

They return it, of course. Joe and Nicky tell her all about how they do this, how they return objects. “One at a time isn’t very effective,” Joe says sadly. “Plus it’s hard to display it afterwards, obviously. There are times where it’s truly better to do things the academic way, the legal way. But when all else fails…”  
Nile nods, understanding. Sure. When all else fails, commit a museum heist. Absolutely a normal part of her life now.

But it’s when they’ve returned it that Nile realizes it’s only been just over two weeks. It’s been two weeks and Andy said three months, and Nile has no idea what happens next. “So, do we…I don’t know, pick another museum?” She asks.

They exchange one of those long looks again, where they don’t even need words to read each other’s minds. “How about a beach?”


	7. Chapter Seven

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> They have many years to fill. Joe and Nicky show Nile how it's done.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hello, all!
> 
> Really, no specific warnings for this chapter. They relax a bit, honestly.
> 
> I hope you enjoy!

“It’s no Malta,” Nicky says, and Nile snorts and bumps his shoulder.

It’s not Malta, but Nile couldn’t say whatever makes Malta so special. She’s barely ever been to the beach before, and in her opinion, Costa Rica is a great place for beaches. 

She has to buy a bathing suit, as do Nicky and Joe. But they don’t let that stop them, and within five minutes at the beach, Nicky and Joe have wrestled each other into the water and dragged each other down into the surf, laughing the whole time.

Nile laughs watching them and lifts her drink in a mock toast when they look over, then goes back to the first cheesy sci-fi book she’s taken the time to read in over seven long months. 

“It’s like this, sometimes,” Joe says from beside her several hours later, dripping dry in the sun while Nicky goes to chase down drinks for them. “Sometimes, you just have to take in the good in the world.”

Nile sips the last of her daiquiri. “Stolen art and beaches?”

Joe nods. “And family. You’re getting it.”

Nile taps her hand against the chair and nods, contemplating. Family. As much as the word still hurts, is still loaded with something else, another time, an unending ache, it feels right. They’re family, now.   


They order room service that night, all of them worn out by the sun. “Where do you think they are now?” Nile asks, and she doesn’t need to qualify who  _ they  _ are.

“Probably doing some sort of memory tour, going back to places long past,” Nicky says, shrugging and spearing his food.

Oh. That makes sense, she supposes, when you’re as old as they are. Like her Mom and Dad used to visit the same restaurant they had their first date at on their anniversary, only with thousands of years of added history.

“Do you two do that too?” She asks thoughtlessly, still caught up in the thought of her parents, but not so caught up that she doesn’t see Nicky’s mouth tighten, his lips turn down.

“Of a sort,” Joe says evasively a minute later, and Nile barely suppresses her wince. Right. They didn’t exactly meet-cute, they’re probably not retracing their steps all the way back to the gates of Jerusalem for happy reminiscing.

Part of her wants to ask if they’ve ever been back, but it feels like a really, really intrusive question.

“You’ll probably do it too, one day.” And that thought stops Nile short. Nile, old enough to tour her greatest hits around the world.

“I’ll start at that ugly Merrick Pharmaceuticals building,” she muses, grasping to cover her surprise. “ _ This is where I first jumped off a skyscraper _ .”

“This is where you first saved your family,” Nicky corrects.

And how is Nile supposed to avoid smiling at that?

Nicky finally shows her how to shoot a sniper rifle, finding them a place that doesn’t ask too many questions (something Nile resolved not to think about too much). 

The actual shooting, when she gets the hang of it, is fine, although she’s not sure she’ll ever have the patience for it that Nicky clearly has. Joe offers her a sword when she gets home, and that’s clearly much more her speed.

And when they come in, sweaty and worn out from bashing at each other with swords, Nicky has dinner almost ready and shoos them to shower.

“You ever work as a chef?” She asks, scraping the bottom of her bowl.

“Multiple times.”

She tilts her head. “Most ridiculous job you’ve ever had?”

So they launch into a story about a particularly ridiculous caravan they’d guarded probably not long after they first got together, by the sound of it. The story goes wildly off track quickly and devolves into multiple languages, but Nile gets the gist and can’t keep the smile off her face while the two of them lean against each other, laughing.

Joe sits opposite her the next morning while Nile finishes an egg. “You’re young.”

She sets her fork down. “I…don’t know how to answer that.”

“You’re, what, twenty-three?”

“Twenty-five,” she corrects, then shakes her head. “Twenty-six.”

His brow furrows. “Did we miss your birthday?”

She waves her hand. “ _ I  _ missed my birthday,” she explains. It’s true; it had been shortly after they found Quynh, and they’d all been a little distracted. It was probably a good thing; she’s not sure how she’d have handled missing her family.

It’s not like they’d all been together on her last several birthdays. She’d been deployed. But there’d always been a call when they could, a card that showed up too late. And now, there couldn’t be that anymore.

She shakes herself out of that train of thought. “Doesn’t really matter anymore.”

“Why not?”

“Am I really twenty-six? I don’t get older.”

“Well, I’m not thirty-three, I can tell you that,” Joe says. “We get older, Nile. Just because our bodies don’t change, doesn’t mean we don’t.”

“None of you celebrate your birthdays.”

“Maybe you just haven’t been around for our birthdays yet.”

Nile levels him with a particularly unimpressed look, and he waves a hand. “Yes, well. Exact dates are a little more difficult. I think Booker still knows his. But you, you have yours. We should celebrate.”

“That was a few months ago.”

He shrugs. “What’s time, anyways?”

Nile sighs, but supposes she can’t even argue against him, considering how  _ time _ seems to work here. “Why did you even ask?”

“Huh?”

“How old I am. You started with  _ you’re young _ , and I feel like we got sidetracked from there.”

“Ah. Well. I had realized, you’re young. And you’ve been stuck hanging out with two very old men, and we might be boring.”

Nile snorts. “Right. Grand theft and identity fraud are very boring to me.”

Joe makes a face that Nile has learned to interpret as  _ fair enough _ , but continues. “Yes, well. It seems even more important now than earlier to find out what interests young people, considering we missed your celebration.”

“Okay, one,” Nile says, holding up a finger, “stop talking about yourself like you’re my grandfather. You guys might be almost a thousand years old but you still act like thirty-somethings most of the time. I get it, it’s weird, you’re old and not at the same time. But you’re not  _ old men _ or something. Not really. And two, I don’t need to go clubbing or something for my birthday.”

“But do you want to?” He presses. “You’re allowed to do things you want, Nile.”

She thinks of the exactly one time she got to go clubbing with her girls, Dizzy and Jay, dancing and definitely past tipsy, laughing and having a great time. And it feels like a punch in her gut, knocking the breath out of her for a moment.

“Do you all even do that?” She asks, hoping to deflect.

He raises an eyebrow. “Nile. As you say, we look young. Act young. Besides. Dancing is not a new invention.”

“We don’t like, waltz in clubs or anything, you know that right?”

Joe snorts. “Are we old or not? Make up your mind, Nile. Anyways. The waltz is younger than us.”

“I don’t want to go clubbing, Joe.”

“You sure? We make good wing-men.”

Nile raises an eyebrow, and Joe pulls a face. “I imagine we do. Andy…has never needed a wing-man to support her in her life, so I don’t have much experience. But I imagine we’d be great at it!”

Nile’s pretty sure she doesn’t need the two of them staring down anyone she’s trying to potentially sleep with, but she doesn’t bring it up. 

Like she  _ really _ wants to bring someone back here. They have swords by the door. No, thank you.

“I don’t want to go clubbing,” she reiterates. “It’s always more stress than it’s worth.”

“What do you want, then? Anything, Nile.”

She has a sudden flash of the birthdays where her Mom would bring her and four friends out to the movies, then to get pizza. It’d be bitterly cold—the drawbacks of having a winter birthday in Chicago—but they’d always make the walk between the theatre and the restaurant all hyped up on sugar, smiles on their faces, wind whipping their faces. 

“I want a deep-dish pizza,” she decides. 

She expects Joe to tell her no, or to laugh. They are, after all, nowhere near Chicago. Nowhere near deep-dish pizza.

But he smiles. “Alright,” he says, like that’s that.

Apparently, that is that. They can’t find deep dish pizza, but Nicky  _ makes _ her some, using YouTube videos as a tutorial. “I thought this would offend your Italian sensibilities,” she muses, watching him layer in the cheese.

“I am older than pizza,” he says absently. “I am older than the tomato’s introduction to Italy. I’m older than what you think of as the Italian language. Anything that’s happened since is not my problem.”

Nile cracks up and tries to steal a pepperoni, and gets her hand batted away for her troubles.

When it’s done, they have pizza so hot it burns the roof of Nile’s mouth. It heals a lot faster, but it still feels like old times.

And then there’s a gift. “When’d you get this?” She demands, playing with the ribbon.

Joe smirks. “Nicky kept you distracted with the pizza.”

She opens the paper to find a stack of books, all fantasies and sci-fis. She thumbs through the pages. “How’d you know?”

“You were reading the first in the series of that one on vacation,” Joe explains. “I asked the shopkeeper for recommendations.”

“You noticed?”

Both of their eyes go very soft. “Of course,” Nicky says. “You’re our sister, Nile.”

Nile studies the cover of the book very intensely to hide the tears that well up. When she looks up, they’re both still watching her with impossibly soft eyes.

“Thank you,” she manages. They definitely know she’s close to tears, but all they do is smile softly at her.

“Not done yet, Nile,” Nicky murmurs, and then he gets up and retreats to the kitchen, returning with a cake.

And not just any cake. It’s an American funfetti cake, making Nile laugh and then hiccup on a sob simultaneously. Nicky being Nicky has made it three layers and frosted it with delicate little roses.

“When did you have time for  _ this? _ ”

Nicky just smiles and fumbles for the lighter, candles already in the cake top. “Joe kept you distracted with swords this morning.” He lights the candles, and Joe and Nicky begin to sing. The tunes and languages are both different, and neither are at all what she’s used to, and it feels like she’s floating and crying at the same time.

“How do you even know what funfetti is?” Nile asks as Nicky hands her a slice.

“I was a preschool teacher in America for two years,” he says without even looking up from the next slice.

“You were...I’m sorry,  _ what? _ ”

He smiles softly. “Not what you’d expect? I liked it. I liked the children. Besides, my husband practically abandoned me all day to become some big shot reclusive artist.” He nudges Joe’s chair as he says it.

Joe snorts. “I recall spending an excessive amount of time in your classroom teaching children art, love.”

Nicky waves the serving knife at Joe. “And you loved it.”

“And I loved it.”

Nicky finally gets himself a slice and sits back down. “See, Nile? There are upsides to our lives. Joe and I never would have had that, been able to try that life on, as it were, without our long lives. But we liked it.”

Nile turns that over in her mind, tries to adjust to it. “Plus, you learned about funfetti,” she manages.

Nicky smiles brightly. “Plus, I learned about funfetti. Now, eat. Tell me how I did.”

It’s delicious, of course. Nile did not expect anything less.

They go to the beach again, and laze about the house. Nile reads her new books and sleeps in until noon some days. Just when she thinks they’re going to have this lazy existence until Andy and Quynh come back—she’s not sure how she feels, laziness is not something natural to her—Joe returns home with three brand new smart phones.

Nicky’s face lights up. “That could be fun.”

“Mhm,” Joe agrees, already unboxing one. “What I thought too.”

“Thought what?”

“We are very old, Nile,” Nicky says, all fake seriousness but with a twinkle in his eye, “but we have learned some useful things this century.”

“Like the value of smartphones,” Joe continues.

Nile looks between the two, like they might be screwing with her. “You’re just learning this now?” She demands, waving the iPhone Joe bought her months ago. “I’ve been saying, and you all act like they’re this massive foreign inconvenience.”

“They have, hm, specific uses,” Nicky says.

“Like what?”

“You ever played hide and seek?”

The rules, it turns out, are simple. Well, the “beginner’s” rules are, at any rate— “You can tackle the more complicated ones when you’re older.”

They name a country, not the one they’re in. The hider has a day head start, and must “hide” in that country. “Don’t be like Andy,” Joe advises. “She claims she doesn’t always remember modern political boundaries, but Brazil and Japan are literally different continents.”

Then, every hour or so, they must send pictures to the people seeking, giving small clues. “Real clues this time, love,” Nicky adds sternly, while Joe grins unrepentantly.

“You love my photos.”

“Yes, and they are  _ not helpful _ , and we said we’d play so Nile can join in.”

Nile decides not to ask what kind of pictures Joe has been sending.

“You’re usually allowed free movement in the country of choice, but we’ll limit the range for your first game,” Joe says magnanimously. 

“One square mile,” Nicky agrees.

“One problem,” Nile points out. “I only speak English. Little bit of Spanish. Barely any French.”

“One of us will be with you,” Nicky assures her.

“But we should work on that. Soon. Next on the list,” Joe adds.

So the only question left is who is “hiding.” Joe and Nicky stare at each other long and hard, and then solve it very maturely with rock-paper-scissors.

“Seriously?” Nile asks while Joe crows with victory.

Nicky shrugs. “It solves the problem, right?”

Nile raises her eyebrow, but can’t really say anything against it.

Nile comes out of her bedroom the next morning to find Nicky reading a note left on the counter. She leans over his shoulder, to read  _ Iceland _ scribbled on it.

She raises an eyebrow. “Joe left without waking you?”

“He likes to think so,” Nicky says, before setting the note down. “We have some hours to go before we can go after him. Would you like breakfast?”   


After a hearty breakfast and closing out the house—apparently Nicky has determined they will move on once they find Joe—Nicky announces he has a flight for them.

“This is…a commercial airport?”

“Yes?”

“I have never seen any of you fly commercial.”

Nicky shrugs. “With good enough passports, it is not a problem. As long as we do not do it every time. That would create a pattern.” He smiles. “Plus, you can only do it when you do not intend to carry weapons.”

So Nile gets to test her Canadian passport against airport security and has to fight the urge to fake a Canadian accent. She meets up with Nicky again on the other side. “How does this usually work?”

He checks his watch. “Joe will send us the first picture in…thirty minutes or so. We should have it before we board the plane, and we can look it over.”

“How do you usually find each other? Use your weird psychic couple sense?”

Nicky snorts slightly as he laughs. “No, although yes, it can help sometimes. But Joe has promised to send us useful pictures, although I’m sure he’ll make it as hard as possible.”

“So no street signs.”

“Probably not.”

“How long does this game usually last?”

“Not counting when Andy cheats, the longest was twenty-six days. But it will be shorter, since we limited how far Joe can travel.”

“Twenty-six days. Damn.”

Nicky smiles. “Joe always said Booker cheated. Booker said it was not specifically against the rules.”

She braces for the usual tension when they talk about Booker, but it doesn’t come. “What did he do?”

“He charmed a beautiful woman into letting him stay with her. She was an artist. He sent us the art she had in her home as pictures, and Joe desperately searched every memory of every artist he had, every museum within the country. When she moved on from him after five days, he found another person to take him home. Now, there are rules about staying in private residences we do not own.”

Nile smiles at that softly. “What’s the shortest the game’s ever been?”

“Ah, Booker again. Joe was hiding. Booker found him four hours after he landed in Germany.”

“How?!” She demands, expecting some lucky story of great coincidence.

“He tracked the credit card Joe was using.”

Right. Of course. How they catch pretty much everyone on the run. Hadn’t Nile herself told Booker that strategy,  _ follow the money _ ?

But she perks up. “So, you and Joe share everything, right? Including finances?”

“Joe will use a credit card to get to Iceland, and after that, will pay everything in cash,” Nicky says.

She shrugs. “Worth a try.”

Nicky smiles. “Indeed. And I like that you think through all our options. You have a good mind for strategy.”

“I ask the obvious questions.”

“Mm, and the best answers are sometimes the obvious. Might as well eliminate them first.”

Nile looks around and sees the airport staples she adapted to after enlisting. “Want a pretzel?” She asks, jerking her head to Auntie Anne’s.

Nicky’s lips go thin but he nods at least, so she gets them giant pretzels and they sit at the gate. Nile eats with gusto, and Nicky chews contemplatively, but doesn’t complain.

Their phones vibrate, and they both scramble for the picture.

It’s Joe, grinning at them, standing in front of a clothing store with absolutely no signage in sight, just the window showing a black-tie mannequin inside. 

Nicky studies it closely, then sighs. “Well. At least we’ll recognize it when we get there.”

Nile pours over the picture on the start of the flight, but there’s nothing to give away Joe’s location, not even a reflection or a corner of a sign. She gives up about an hour in.

Nicky, for his part, leans back in his seat, eyes closed, and he’d look fully relaxed to anyone but Nile. “How’re you doing?” She asks.

He hums. “I know we’d survive a plane crash, and I’m very used to flying at this point. I still am not sure I like being in the air like this.”

Right. Because he’s getting close to turning a thousand. Sometimes, that particular detail slips Nile’s mind.

“How are you doing without Joe?” She decides to be brave and ask. “This is literally the longest I’ve ever seen you apart.”

He hums again. “We’re not actually inseparable, you know.”

“Could’ve fooled me.”

He opens an eye to look at her. “We once spent an entire decade apart. That was unpleasant, and not entirely by choice. But a few months…sometimes, we’re needed in different places, for different tasks. Sometimes we feel called different places. We do not stop each other from doing what is right. A few months, a year maybe, is possible without problem. A few hours is nothing.”

Nile opens her mouth and closes it again, thinks of what Joe told her when he and Nicky got back from New Zealand all those months ago, that they’d needed that time to re-set, to trust the other would always come back. Nicky looks fully settled into that trust.

“A decade?” She asks instead, hoping it won’t be something he doesn’t want to talk about.

He shrugs. “We separated. We were meant to meet back up within a year—travel took longer then—but it seemed we both had a string of bad luck. Battles broke out, lands changed hands, I spent six months a prisoner, pissing off the wrong local lord. A widow asked Joe’s help and he couldn’t say no, which meant he could not leave on time to beat the winter. Communication was more difficult. You were either where you said you’d be when you said, or not. Messages were harder. It took ten years to find each other. Our own little odyssey,” he muses. He turns more fully towards her and smiles. “But we always find each other. A few hours, a month. A year, a decade. A hundred years, if need be. It doesn’t matter, we find each other.” He touches her phone on her tray table. “And now he sends me pictures to guide my way.”

That might just be the most romantic thing Nile’s ever heard, and she doesn’t know how to respond to that. So she just smiles back at Nicky.

He nudges her shoulder. “It’s the same for you, for any of us,” he says softly. “Joe and I are different, yes, but not that different. A day, a month, a year, a thousand…whatever it is, whenever we’re apart. We’ll always be waiting for you, Nile.”

Like Quynh. Like Booker. Like Andy. She doesn’t say it, but she sees them in Nicky’s eyes, and just nods back at him.

That she  _ definitely  _ doesn’t know how to respond to, but Nicky seems to know that, and hands her a bottle of water instead.

When they land and turn their phones back on, there’s a whole series of pictures waiting for them. 

The cover of a book. A mural. Selfies of Joe grinning in front of nondescript pieces of nondescript buildings. What looks like Joe’s lunch.

Nile squints at the one that looks like Joe drinking coffee in a coffee shop. “You see this?” She asks, pointing to the corner.

“See what?” He asks, leaning over and shrugging. They’re sitting in the corner of the airport, not even out of the terminal yet. People pass around them, but Nile ignores them as she peers at the image.

“There’s a flyer in the corner,” she murmurs. She zooms the image, pinching it on the camera. “There’s a QR code.”

“A QR code….?”

“That boxy thing. It’s small, don’t know how much use I’ll have blowing it up…” She murmurs. She gets the image to the fine line of as big as possible without losing definition, and then scans the QR code.

It works. She hands the phone to Nicky, knowing she can’t read what’s on it. “I cannot read every language, you know,” he murmurs.

“Joe wouldn’t have picked Iceland if you both didn’t speak Iclandic,” Nile says confidently.

Nicky smiles at her. “Astute. But speaking and reading are different.”

She deflates slightly, but she’s already planning on flagging down one of the passersby. Maybe someone who works here, to make sure they’re a local. As a last resort, Google Translate. “So you can’t?”

He relents. “It will take me a moment.”

It does take him a moment, but he raises an eyebrow at her. “It’s an open mic night,” he says. “At a coffee shop.” He tells her the name, and she takes her phone back and plugs the name into the search bar.

“Three of them,” she reports. 

Nicky gives her a bright smile. “Nile, that’s wonderful! You have narrowed it down. We can go to these places and see if anything in the area matches Joe’s pictures.”

Nile holds up one finger, and keeps typing with the other hand. The language barrier is giving her some trouble, but she knows her way around social media.

More precisely, this was Jay’s speciality, social media backtracking that could tell you a person you just learned the name of’s grandmother, high school sweetheart, and favorite restaurant. She tries not to think too hard about her old friends.

She sticks her tongue out between her teeth as she searches, humming softly. Nicky waits patiently beside her, even though Nile knows he has zero idea what she’s doing.

She holds the phone out to him. “This place.”

Nicky blinks and takes the phone to look at the Facebook post more closely. “How do you know?”

She taps the screen. “Same blonde girl. I just searched up the Facebook pages for each storefront. Same blonde girl in the corner of one of Joe’s pictures.”

Nicky stares at her for a moment, then smiles even wider. “So you have an address?”

She moves off the picture and to the address below. “Here we go.”

Nicky shakes his head, still smiling. “You are truly impressive, Nile.”

“He probably won’t be in the coffee shop anymore. I mean, unless he needs another cup.”

Nicky checks his watch and shakes his head. “No. Too late in the day.”

Nile puts the address into Google maps and shows Nicky the street view with all the shops nearby labelled. Joe technically has a square mile to move around in, but he probably doesn’t want to move too far.

“There,” Nicky says, pointing to the bookstore. “He’ll be here.”

It takes them long enough to get there that Joe sends another picture. Nile looks it over, sees a comfy chair that looks like something a bookstore might have, and Joe grinning at them from it.

Nicky shakes his head when Nile describes it to him as he drives. “He thinks he is so hidden from us.”

Nicky finds them parking, and then puts a finger to his lips when they approach the bookstore. He walks in and moves around quietly, almost like Nile sees him on a mission.

“Did you find a book for me, love?” Nicky asks as he sneaks up behind Joe, who  _ jumps _ .

“How…how did you…” Joe shakes his head. “You left too early!”

“We did not.”

“Did you  _ teleport _ here, then?” He demands.

“We landed just an hour ago,” Nicky says, taking the book hanging from Joe’s fingers smoothly. “Nile is simply that good.”

Both their attention turns to her, and Nile awkwardly waves.

Joe laughs loud enough to attract the shop keeper’s attention.

They find a hotel, and Nicky insists on champagne with dinner.

“To Nile!” He toasts. “The new champion.”

Nile blushes and ducks her head. “Nah, you guys made it easy for me,” she murmurs. “This was beginner’s hide and seek, right?”

Joe nudges her shoulder. “Take the compliment. You were impressive today.”

“You beat the old record by two hours and ten minutes,” Nicky agrees. “Truly impressive.”

“You think of things we never would.”

She shrugs. “And I can’t read Iclandic. Not to mention, I don’t have creepy encyclopedic Joe radar. So…it worked out.”

“Indeed. Like destiny, hm?” Nicky asks.

Nile manages a laugh. “Alright, there. Bit much.”

“No,” Joe says, “it’s not. We’re happy to see what else you bring to us, Nile.”

Nicky’s smile gets sneaky. “But keep this quiet, hm? I want Andy to experience it in person.”


	8. Chapter Eight

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> They keep moving on.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hey all! Happy Wednesday.
> 
> Let's see, warnings for nightmares (totally non explicit) and Nile having some complicated feelings about *checks notes* murder.
> 
> Also, they do a job, so canon-ish (really way less) levels of violence.
> 
> Enjoy!

The hotel is incredibly nice, and Nicky and Joe give her the master bedroom in the suite, with its own ensuite, including a jacuzzi tub.

She raises her eyebrow. “Two people should have the king,” she points out.

“Why? Like we’ll use the space,” Nicky argues.

“Yes, the luxury queen in the room with the memory foam mattress is a true hardship for two men who slept on dirt grounds for hundreds of years,” Joe adds, the sarcasm thick.

Nile doesn’t argue anymore, and takes the tub.

The tub is very nice, and Nile takes more baths than she perhaps ever has in such a concentrated period of time over the next four days.

And Nicky and Joe clearly don’t mind the queen bed, if the sounds Nile hears from their bedroom when she goes to get a glass of water in the middle of the night are any indication. And that’s, well. She raises the glass in mocking salute to their door, and heads back to bed. That’s good for them.

On day four, Joe’s tragically pathetic flip phone—and really, she  _ knows _ they know how to use a smartphone now—rings. He picks up right away, relaxes a bit as he starts talking.

“Andy,” Nicky murmurs beside her, listening to Joe’s half of the conversation. 

Nicky doesn’t continue to translate, just listens, but Nile can gather enough on her own, even not knowing the language. Joe's shoulders grow tense, and he holds the phone between raised shoulder and ear, gesticulating with his hands as he talks.

Finally, he hands up, still tense. “Yes?” Nicky prompts.

“Another month,” Joe mutters. “They want another month in addition to the three they already asked for.”

“A month is nothing,” Nicky assures him.

“It is when Andy won’t say anything besides that they’re  _ fine.” _

“Yusuf. Listen to me. A month is  _ nothing. _ Our sisters are immortal, and we have been blessed with more time. They are older than even us by orders of magnitude. A month means nothing. We will see them soon.” He rubs a hand across Joe’s shoulders and back.

“We should be there with them.”

“That is not what they need.”

Joe tenses you further for a moment, and then relaxes, like he’s released it all. “You’re always right, love.”

Nicky smiles a ghost of a smile. “I know.”

“I don’t like being away from them.”

“What is it Nile told us? About oxygen masks?”

“You put on your own oxygen mask first,” Nile says dutifully.

“Yes, that. They are doing that. And we must wait for them to finish it.”

“Did they say where they were?” Nile asks.

“Turkey, right now, but Andy says they’re moving on soon. She did not say where next.”

Nile considers this. “They probably have worse accommodations than we do.”

That startles a laugh out of Joe, and Nicky gives her a grateful smile.

Nicky loses at nose-goes—a game Joe assures her is absolutely  _ delightful _ and something they have very much needed for centuries—and has to go pick up dinner around the corner, so Nile ends up sprawled onto the couch with Joe.

“I didn’t know you were so worried about them,” she says.

Joe looks up from his sketchpad. “I worry,” he says simply.

“You don’t show it.”

He tilts his head. “Being apart is not difficult. Well. No. We are a family, Nile. We love each other. But we spend time apart. Decades, sometimes, if need be. Although we usually visit.” She nods, encouraging him to continue. “Nico is right. Four months altogether is practically nothing. Modern travel changes things, but it used to be months and months just to get to a place—“

“—Nicky’s already told me that bit.”

He nods. “Right. Just before you met us, we had split up for a year. It’s not unusual.”

“So why now?”

He’s silent for a solid minute. “Because Andy and...and Booker spent enough time pushing us away when they might need help.” He doesn’t look at her.

“Joe…”

He waves away her words. “I know.”

She contemplates him for a moment, then leans into him. “They’re helping each other.” She’s had her own doubts about how good this can be—what with what she saw of Quynh, before she vanished—but she also suspects that Andy and Quynh are the only ones who can heal each other. “Besides. Are you saying I’m not enough of a handful? Looking after me doesn’t take enough work? I can make it harder, you know.”

Joe manages a laugh and squeezes her shoulders. “Sometimes, I wonder who is looking after who, here.”

They leave Iceland—despite the endless pits of centuries old money, it is too expensive according to a complaining Nicky—and instead make their way to Ireland, where they rent a small house.

Nicky and Joe unpack methodically—not that there’s much to unpack, really, except for groceries—Leaving Nile at loose ends for most of the day. She putters around and tries to look vaguely enthused about meal planning, but her heart isn’t much in it.

“Anything I can do to help?” She tries a few times, and they alternate between having small tasks for her and telling her they have it.

Dinner, at least, is good. Made even better with stories about the last time they were in Ireland, which turns out to have been a genuine locked-room murder mystery. The fact that Joe was the “murdered” man and Nicky the prime suspect just sends Nile laughing.

Nicky shakes his head. “His lazy ass, got to sleep in the morgue, while I am evading the law and freeing him from the authorities.”

“But we got away,” Joe finishes. “Although I liked that cottage. Shame we couldn’t go back.”

“Wait, wait. Who murdered you, really?” Nile asks.

Nicky goes into full-body laughter, while Joe goes mysteriously silent, and Nile has to wait for Nicky to calm down. “His own stupidity, apparently,” Nicky wheezes. “He fell and hit his head in, blood everywhere. The neighbor came at just the wrong time.”

Joe raises an eyebrow, but he’s smiling. “Keep talking, love,” he threatens. “You have embarrassing deaths too.”

After dinner, they wash up and read in the main room for a bit, before drifting off to bed.

Nile didn’t expect the nightmares.

There’s no reason for them. It was a happy enough night. They’re in a nice enough place. Nothing big or strange has happened. 

And yet she wakes up, covered in a layer of sweat and frantic. It’s her brother again, dead eyes staring up at her, and she wasn’t there. She let him die, wasn’t there for him. Went off to war, went off to immortality, the point is she wasn’t there and he  _ died _ .

She takes deep, gulping breaths for a moment before swinging her legs out of bed, tugging on a sweatshirt as she walks towards the door.

No Nicky. Her senses kick up, her muscles tense. Nicky is  _ always  _ there when she wakes up like this, always.

Just when she’s about to turn around to grab a weapon, she hears Nicky’s soft voice from the kitchen. “In here, Nile.”

She follows the sound, and sure enough, Nicky and Joe are both seated at the kitchen table.

Joe looks like he hasn’t slept in weeks. He’s got bedhead something awful, his eye bags have bags, and he’s wrapped up in a blanket.

Nicky’s brows are furrowed as he sips his tea and watches Joe, and Nile already knows which one of them had the nightmare tonight.

“Would you like tea?”

“I got it,” Nile mumbles, putting the kettle back on and fishing for tea bags. “Either of you need another cup?”

Joe makes a humming noise she takes as assent, so she makes two mugs and sets one down in front of him before grabbing her own seat.

“Want to talk about it?” Nicky asks.

“No.”

Joe just looks at her, one hand sneaking out of his blanket to clutch the mug. “Want to play cards?”

They end up playing Rummy until dawn breaks, and Nicky cleans them out repeatedly.

Joe falls asleep on the couch when the sun is high, and Nicky passes out on the floor next to him, one hand reaching up to clutch at Joe’s. Nile falls asleep for a bit later, on the armchair closest to the fire.

They wake up for dinner, and the three of them work together to put sandwiches together.

Joe stretches almost immediately after his plate is clean. “We’ll get the dishes in the morning,” he says. “Leave ‘em in the sink. I’m going to bed.”

Nile raises an eyebrow, but even she has to admit that she’s still tired.

Nicky gives her a half smile. “Sleep when you can, Nile.”

“You sound like Andy.”

“Andy is a wise woman. Sleep.”

Nile startles awake in the night. She doesn’t remember a nightmare, but still feels tension throughout her body, her muscles tightened, her breathing quieted by force of habit. 

She hears a sound in the hallway, a footstep going past, the TV turning on. She sighs and swings herself out of bed.

Maybe she didn’t have a nightmare tonight, but it sounds like someone has. And they’re her family now.

At the very least, she can make tea.

She finds her oversized sweatshirt and tugs it on as she walks out the door. Her bare feet hit the wooden floor and she wishes she thought to stop for socks, but it’s too late now.

Nicky looks up from the couch, with Joe tucked into his side. “You too?” He murmurs.

Nile shrugs, and Nicky doesn’t press. “Want tea?”

Joe hums, but somehow Nile doesn’t think it’s a yes this time. She’s getting moderately good at deciphering tired Joe.

There’s a football game on, the volume almost all the way off, only the lowest mumble left. She sits down on Nicky’s other side and tucks her toes under his thigh, making him jump slightly. “ _ Fuck _ , Nile.”

Joe stirs and picks his head up, but Nicky just strokes his hair. “Shh, love,” Nicky murmurs to him, and continues stroking until Joe settles back down. He watches him for a few more minutes, until Joe drops off again, seemingly asleep.

Nicky turns back to her. “He gets like this,” he tells her softly. “You and I, our nightmares are regular enough, it seems. For Joe, he will go a long while, sleep better than any of us, and then…he will barely sleep for days or weeks. And then, pffft, they are gone. And it starts again. Sometimes for years.”

“Anything in particular worrying him?” She asks, voice barely a whisper. 

Nicky shrugs. “Andy. Quynh. Old memories. He will be fine, Nile. We are here for him.”

Joe huffs and snuggles closer into Nicky’s side, and Nile can’t help her smile.

Joe wakes them up again with an aborted yell, sometime long after the soccer match is over. Nicky’s awake and alert before Nile, and has both arms around Joe and is whispering to him, definitely not in English.

Nile gets up and goes to the kitchen, putting the kettle on for tea. While she waits, she checks the clock on the microwave. Almost four.

Not an impossible time to get up, although Nile is long since out of the early morning habits of the military.

How long has it been, anyways? Since Andy handed her new clothes and took her away?

Too long. A lifetime.

The kettle whistles, shaking Nile’s thoughts, and she makes an entire teapot and brings three mugs, all stacked up on a tray.

Joe seems to like having something warm to hold, even if his eyes are drooping again. Nicky takes his own mug one handed, ensuring his other hand doesn’t leave Joe’s back. 

Nile surveys the scene. Joe is leaning into Nicky, the two of them taking up impossibly little space for two people, but there’s still very little space between him and the edge of the couch. “Budge up,” she murmurs, and Joe looks up at her for a moment before moving even closer to Nicky, who also scoots a few inches, pulling Joe with him.

It’s not a lot of space, but Nile doesn’t need much. She leans into Joe’s side, and drinks her tea.

Nicky barely catches Joe’s mug when he falls asleep again, setting the almost empty mug on the table, smiling fondly at Joe.

“Thank you, Nile.”

“I didn’t do anything.”

Nicky doesn’t respond, just raises an eyebrow at her, but Nile doesn’t think he’s thanking her just for the tea.

Nile has no idea what time it is when she smells food, but she wakes up on the couch, half on top of Joe, to see Nicky in the kitchen.

“What’s it?” She asks.

Nicky smiles at her from across the counter. “Ten more minutes. See if you can wake him up.”

Nile shakes Joe’s shoulder, and almost gets a fist to the face for her trouble. He’s slow though, eyes closed, so she dodges and shakes him again, unimpressed.

This time he cracks open an eye, giving her a baleful look. “Don’t you know I was up half the night?”

She shrugs. “Nicky wants to feed you.”

“And you, Nile!”

“Nicky wants to feed  _ us _ . I’m gonna get a shower, before food’s ready. Nicky, that good?”

“Fine, fine.”

Joe’s still glaring at her from the couch, and Nile suppresses the laughter—he has awful bedhead, his eyes are still squinted half shut, and his glare is as effective as a kitten’s—on her way to the bathroom.

Joe doesn’t look a ton better at breakfast, and Nicky keeps sneaking looks at him, like he’s worried Joe might fall over.

“Tell me a story,” Nile asks softly. “A good one.”

“What kind of good one?”

She shrugs. “Something that makes you happy.”

Nicky tilts his head. “Joe and I tried to go camping, oh, five years ago?”

“Ten,” Joe rasps.

Nicky nods. “Ten.”

“What do you mean,  _ tried _ ? We went camping with Andy and Quynh a few months ago. How do you  _ try _ to go camping?”

“You fail to do your research.”

“You end up at a  _ modern camping _ place,” Joe supplies.

“Not that we do not appreciate luxurious modern things. We do. We understand how the world has grown and appreciate most of it. But it was…” He continues moving his hands, as if they can portray a point he can’t. “It was unexpected. They call it  _ glamping _ . It was…not what we wanted.”

Joe snorts. “We abandoned the place, couldn’t get our deposit back, and ended up making our own campsite very much in the middle of nowhere.”

“We  _ thought _ it was the middle of nowhere,” Nicky corrects.

Joe nods his head in agreement. “Yes, that. Turns out, it was park land.”

“And camping was forbidden.”

“So Joe had to talk our way out of being fined.”

“Or arrested. Personally, I think he was leaning towards arrested.”

Nicky nods. “It was not so long after that film.  _ Brokeback Mountain _ . I think he’d made some assumptions.”

“Not  _ entirely _ inaccurate assumptions.”

Nile snorts. “But you talked your way out?”

“Joe can talk our way out of most things.”

“By then it was too late to go back to the campground. So we ended up sleeping in the car.”

“Still camping, I think. And a good vacation.”

Nile smiles, watching them watch each other. “Tell me another one.”

Joe sleeps the next night. Or Nile assumes he does, because nothing wakes her up in the night and he looks perfectly fine when she sees him the next day.

She doesn’t see him until around noon, when she rolls out of bed, possibly the latest she’s slept since before enlisting. “Sorry,” she mumbles, rubbing her sweatshirt-covered hand over her face and moving towards the coffee machine.

“Why are you sorry? I don’t remember any plans for today.”

Nile stops to consider before pouring a cup. “Adults are supposed to be sorry when they sleep all day.”

“Seems ridiculous,” Joe decides. “You didn’t miss anything or neglect anything. I’d assume you feel good now.”

“Mhm.”

“There you go. Sleep when you can.”

She tilts her head as she adds sugar. “In that case, I might nap this afternoon.”

“It already is afternoon,” Nicky points out. “But that’s fine.”

“And then tomorrow, I want to see some of this country.”

“Sure.”

She sips her coffee. “You guys are…really low maintenance.”

“If you think sleeping in will bother us after nine hundred years…”

Nile shrugs. “Never know. Anyways.” She sits at the table and pulls the laptop closer, intent on finding some sights.

She does get to do some local touring, but she comes to breakfast a few days later to find Nicky and Joe already tense at the table, debating back and forth. Not angry, not frustrated, at least not that she can tell—and she can’t understand a word—but just tense.

They stop when she enters, turn to her, and Nicky tries a smile. “There’s leftovers on the stove.”

“What’s going on?”

They look at each other again before looking towards her. “There’s a job,” Joe admits. “Back in France.”

“A job? For just us?”

“Well, Andy and Quynh won’t be coming, no.”

“Can we do that?”

“We chose which jobs we take, Andy—”

Nile waves him away. “I’m not asking for  _ permission _ . Andy fucked off for months, she doesn’t get a say in what we do. I’m asking for practicality.”

“We can,” Nicky says. “Without a doubt.”

“Almost always, we’ve done more with less. Nicky once single-handedly stormed a prison to free me.”

“And you always greatly exaggerate that story, my love.”

“I tell it exactly how I remember it. But yes, Nile. We can do this.”

It doesn’t take much consideration. “Fill me in.”   
  


“Antiquities smuggling?”

Nicky shrugs at her, methodically assembling his rifle. “There is big money in that. It funds violence, cartels and mobs and all of that. And besides, they are stolen. Obviously. So.”

“Think of it like high-stakes art return,” Joe offers.

Nile snorts. Right. Because robbing the British Museum hadn’t been high-stakes enough.

“I’m just saying,” Nile murmurs as they creep along the edge of the ship, “I’m good enough with my sword now. What gives?”

“And I’m just saying,” Joe says, not even looking at her, “that if we are going to smuggle such an obvious weapon across multiple international borders, you better have a damn good reason for it.”

Nile huffs but doesn’t respond, just clutches the M4 Nicky bought for her and visually checks the three handguns he’d followed up with. Joe has a point, she supposes.

He holds up a fist, and she stops and waits for them to hear the crack of Nicky’s rifle. Joe gives her a nod, and they keep moving.

Nile has been a little leery when Nicky had purchased a sniper rifle for this job. “For antiquities smuggling?”

“When it funds a cartel?”

She’s had to concede the point.

So Nicky takes out the guard, and she and Joe sneak onboard, as silent as possible.

What they really need to do is get below deck, while hopefully not alerting the whole ship—twelve men, according to Copley—simultaneously that they’re present.

“Not that we cannot take them at the same time,” Joe reasoned earlier. “But it gets so…messy.”

“Painful?” Nicky had suggested.

“That too.”

Nile hears the rifle crack again, and another body falls.

Once she and Joe make it down the stairs, he gives her a long look as they split directions. He’s meant to find the damn antiques, and she’ll meet him there. Her job is to make it to the engine room, and sabotage the ship.

“No ship, we slow down their trade,” Joe had reasoned.

“But we don’t stop it.”

Joe had clasped her on the shoulder. “All we can do, sometimes, is slow them down.”

Nicky shrugged. “We will outlive them, Nile. We will be ready when they try again.”

So Nile looks for the engine room, following the carefully labelled blueprint Copley had given Nicky. So far, it’s proven to be accurate.

She doesn’t meet anyone in her way, and just has to hope that that doesn’t mean they’re all on top of Joe right now. 

You’d think, for mercenaries, they’d have better tech. At least some sort of radio communication.

But no. They’ve been doing this forever and they just  _ trust _ that things will work out. Absolutely maddening.

The door to the engine room creaks when she opens it. She winces, holds her breath, but doesn’t see anyone.

She chides herself for her caution for a second. First, no one can kill her, can do damage she can’t come back from. Second, though, their mission explicitly stated there are no issues if they wipe this group out. This might not be a kill job, but it’s not  _ not _ a kill job.

She’s not sure how she feels about that. Yes, she’s killed before. She’s killed recently enough. She’s killed doing jobs with these people. But then, she could always see human lives on the other end. Smuggled women, smuggled children, in immediate danger.

Cartels hurt people. Their operations to get money mean lives loss, indirectly, down the line. That is indisputable. And yet, it doesn’t feel the same.

Regardless, no one comes out at her, so she goes inside and sabotages the engines just like the blueprints told her to.

They’re not hard to sabotage, and Nile gets her work done quickly. The engines are ruined, and will, according to Copley, take tens of thousands of dollars and skilled labor to repair.

So she goes to find Joe. Halfway down the hallway, she hears a noise and spins, gun already at the ready.

His gun is at the ready too, aimed at her. She doesn’t hesitate.

_ Two shots, quick kill _ .

He goes down. Nile stares, unable to take her eyes off the pooling blood, seemingly so vivid even in the dark corridor. 

“Nile? Nile?”

She turns half her attention to Joe, who has a vase under one arm and a small statue in the other. But even the bizarre sight isn’t enough to draw her away from what she’d done.

“I killed him.”

“He aimed a gun at you, yes?” Joe asks.

“I would have survived it.”

“He didn’t know that. And it still hurts. And…” Joe hesitates. “Nile. We did not come here to spare lives.”

No, they didn’t. They’re not here to kill everyone, either. It was never explicitly stated either way. It just…was.

Nile assumed she could sneak her way through. Nicky came with a sniper rifle, and Joe came with the presumption they could clear their own way.

She can’t stop looking at the body.

“I…”

“Go get a case,” Joe tells her gently. “Come one. We don’t have a ton of time.”

One foot in front of the other, Nile does.

Nicky has come down from his perch to help, and they bring the antiquities to the art expert Copley has standing by, and Nile has to hope, somewhere in the back of her mind, that they all make it back to where they belong.

Most of her mind is still focused on the body on the ground. Because she shot him. 

She would walk away. She could walk away. She didn’t need to kill people to survive, because some weird twist of nature had taken care of that. She would walk away from any disaster, any death. 

And that man hadn’t.

She knows Joe and Nicky are taking turns watching her, giving each other looks above her. She’s not blind. She just…doesn’t care.

Nicky shot the guards as they entered. She watched Quynh gruesomely kill a man, watched the rest of the team take out others. Experienced Nicky shoot a man over her once. Broke them out of Merrick’s and killed his security, killed on jobs since to get to their targets. Went to war.

She bites her lip, hard enough to draw blood. Somehow, it’s not the same.

But it is. It is  _ exactly _ the same, it’s exactly the same as that moment after she shot a man for the first time, after she realized what Andy could  _ do _ . 

Because even in the dark, even in that split second, she could see into his eyes. And yes, he’d wanted to do her harm. And yes, his very presence on that boat says bad things about him. 

She still killed him, and she’s still not sure she can justify it to herself.


	9. Chapter Nine

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> It's been almost a year, and it's Nile's turn to decide what she needs.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Happy Thanksgiving, if you celebrate.
> 
> Welcome to our final chapter. Thanks for reading along with me!
> 
> Nile reflects on murder again, and also on death and immortality. There's also a super brief bit about God/Nile's feelings on religion.
> 
> Welcome to the happy "ending." (Can't really call it an ending, because, you know, they will live a very long time and have many more adventures).
> 
> I hope you enjoyed reading this a fraction as much as I enjoyed writing it!

Joe and Nicky get them a one-bedroom hotel room for once. Two queens, so Nile gets her own bed, but they’re right there and make it more than obvious she’s welcome to crawl in with them if she wants.

She takes a long shower, and then feels guilty that she used too much hot water, when they undoubtedly wanted showers too. They say nothing about it.

“Tell us,” Nicky finally commands, gentle as ever, when she’s sitting on the edge of the bed, staring at the cracked wall.

“He didn’t have to die.”

“Maybe not,” Nicky says, and she feels something at least a little warm pressing against the coldness inside her. Nicky always validates what she’s feeling, first and foremost. “But we knew it was a possibility.”

Nile mulls that over for a second. She did. Nicky brought them guns. Joe and her were armed when they entered. She knew who’d they’d been going up against. Yes.

“Turns out,” she says, “I still don’t like killing.” Even though she chose this, even though she’s done it before. Even though she’d had her chance to run and hadn’t taken it in the end, had sacrificed it to go back. Knowing that meant people would die. She’d die.

She chose it. She can’t think of it as a mistake.  _ Mistake _ means an accident, and this was a choice, a choice she’s made a half dozen times now, deliberately, knowingly, on purpose. She doesn’t know if that makes it better or worse.

Joe makes a humming sort of noise, watching her from the other bed. Not reaching out, and she wonders what he sees on her face that makes him hold back like he almost never does. “It’s not easy.”

They make it look easy. It’s not that she thinks they’re monsters—the thought had briefly crossed her mind only once, when she’d seen what Andy did in the church, but never again after that—but she knows they’re more than comfortable with killing.

They died their first deaths on a battlefield nine hundred and change years ago. It makes sense. They have practice.

“Will it get easier?”

They’re silent for a minute. “Yes,” Nicky admits. “But I hope for your sake it never gets too easy.”

“It’d be nice for it to be easy.”

“Moral concerns are good for humans. Particularly those who live like we do. We make more decisions than most, after all.”

And more decisions that can end lives, she supposes. 

She nods, and then turns away from them, curling up in the bed and closing her eyes.

They move around her for a few minutes more, but they do not bother her again.

Nile sees eyes in her sleep. The man on the ship. The man in Afghanistan. Merrick, the guards they killed. Andy, Joe, Nicky, her brother. Booker. Her own, she thinks.

Joe and Nicky left a space for her in their bed, and she takes it.

The next morning isn’t  _ great _ , but it’s better. She’s able to shower, and dress, and order food at the place they stop for breakfast even if she doesn’t feel hungry.

“No more jobs for a while,” Joe says as they get back in the car.

Nile looks at him. “That’s what we do.”

“We do a lot of things, Nile. It’s okay.”

She takes a shaky breath. “I just…I don’t want to stop you. I’m not an idiot, I can see cause and effect. I know you all do good. Do a hell of a lot of good. Save lives and it ripples, that’s what Copley said, right? This is my hangup. It shouldn’t stop me.” She takes another breath. “And I’ll get used to it.”

They share a look, then look at her. She has no idea what their look to each other side, but Joe nods. “Alright then,” he agrees. “But a break for now, okay?”

“You all take a lot of breaks.”

“We’re very old, Nile. Can’t rush into things. Can’t keep going all the time.”

She smiles, and closes her eyes in the back of the car while they work out where to go next.

It turns out, where they go next is Venice, Italy, where they talk about the Renaissance and teach her Italian. “Do I want to learn this language? Considering you two use it all the time?”  _ When you’re being cute _ , she doesn’t say, but they know.

“Italian is very new. We use it only sometimes for that. Usually, we just speak it as a team.”

“What Nicky means is he doesn’t care if you learn Italian. If you’d prefer another language, tell us and we’ll go there. But he’s tired of speaking English.”

Just to prove it, Nicky says something to Joe utterly incomprehensible to Nile.

“Italian is good,” she decides after a moment. “Show me the art.”

They show her the art. And the food, and the language, and Nile even sleeps most nights.

Tonight is not one of them, though. She wakes up from visions of dead empty eyes, gasping for breath.

Nicky is outside her bedroom, watching her calmly in the low light. “Come on,” he invites, and he walks out the door. 

Nile follows, biting her lip. They’re in the city proper, there’s no yard, and neither of them are dressed to be outside. She still follows.

“You still talk to God?” He asks, not looking back at her as he walks a little ways down the street.

“Yes.” Not as often as she should, maybe. 

“One thing about Italy. No shortage of churches.”

“Catholic churches.”

He shrugs. “Does that bother you?”

Catholicism, particularly Roman Catholicism, is very different from how she was raised. It doesn’t bother her, but it’s not right, either. “I don’t need to go to a church,” she says. “Not for that.” She’d very much like to go to one of those churches in the next few days, though. The art is something else.

Nicky gestures with one hand. “Then go find your space. He’ll listen.”

Nile bites her lip again, but nods, and walks off, leaving Nicky watching her.

She wanders the city for an hour, avoiding the few people out, keeping her eyes half on where she’s going and half a little high, like she’s trying to glimpse heaven or something. 

There’s no space she can go to, because she’s been here six days and it’s still a foreign city. But that’s okay. Nile has a lot of foreign cities in her future, probably. Someday, even Chicago will be foreign to her. Might as well find her place in them now.

Her mom always told her God listened wherever you are, whatever is going on. And he would help carry any burden.

She hopes it’s true, because she lays it all down on him.

Nicky’s waiting when she gets back, and he pulls her into a hug and brings her back inside.

They curl up on the couch and watch the sunrise. 

Two weeks later, Andy calls Joe again. Nile’s Italian is better, but it’s no help here. She’s relatively convinced they’re speaking Greek, but it’s really just a guess.

But Joe smiles, and his voice goes all soft, so Nile figures it’s good enough news. 

“Spain,” is all he says when he hangs up, soft smile still in place.

Nicky nods, and that’s all it takes them to pack up.

Nile doesn’t think they’ve taken her back to the same place twice yet, excluding day trips, so going back to Andy’s Spanish cave of treasures is a little jarring.

But Andy and Quynh both wait for them at the mouth of the cave. Both have soft smiles, and something about Andy looks soft. Like she was when they first rescued Quynh, only maybe even easier, more fluid.

They all hug, for a long, long moment, and Nile has to pretend she’s not getting choked up, even as she doesn’t think she fools anyone.

This is her  _ family.  _ Her second family, sure—third, maybe, she’ll have to sort out how she feels about the Marines one day—and not the same as the family she was born in. Weird as shit, for sure. A whole new world.

Still her family, and dammit, she missed Andy and Quynh.

Quynh cups her cheek when she pulls away, smiling softly at Nile. She looks easier too. More grace, less sharp lines liable to break too soon, or break everything around her, whichever came first.

The sharp lines aren’t gone, really. Joe moves too fast and Quynh gives a minute flinch before settling, she still stays closer to Andy than strictly normal, but Nile wouldn’t expect anything less. 

Five hundred years of torture doesn’t go away. Not even after one really good rediscovery road trip with the love of your eternal life.

It’s dusk when they arrive—they drove straight through from Italy—and Quynh wants to show them all the things Andy has returned to her, because of course their end destination was a cave full of Quynh-related treasures. Not that Nile minds being shown. Apparently Quynh had once been quite the model, and Andy had kept the proof, finally taking the drop cloths off the art in the back that Nile had noticed last time.

There are also old clothes and jewelry and weapons and things that look like honest-to-god souvenirs, and Nile has to shake her head at all the stuff that’s piled up around them.

Joe catches her eye. “Storage lockers,” he mutters. “More efficient, these days.”

Andy, being Andy, overhears. “Until you miss a payment and your stuff becomes the local oddity on one of those TV programs, sure.”

“That only happened once,” Joe retorts half-heartedly.

Nicky clears his throat. “I might have to agree with Andy here. Considering that  _ once _ was, hm, almost all art of me.”

“ _ Naked _ ,” Andy stage-whispers to Nile, like it’s some big secret, and Nile can’t help but grin.

“And is this episode online anywhere?”

“That desperate to see Nicky naked?”

“It’ll happen naturally if you hang around long enough, modesty is a modern invention anyways,” Joe adds.

Nile huffs. Assholes.

But Quynh seems to be on her side, and her smile is sly and makes something inside Nile warm. She wants to see it  _ more _ , wants to help Quynh smile all the time. “And what did they do with the art, Yusuf?”

“University,” Nicky answers for him. Then, “We stole them back.”

Quynh shakes her head, mock sadness now. “Think of what you deprived those poor scholars of. All that history.”

“I’m not sure if my body counts as  _ history _ ,” Nicky says dryly. Then, “Andy, do you have any food here? We didn’t stop the whole drive out here.”   
  


Nile wakes up to the sound of their fire crackling, almost burnt out, and her friends and family breathing softly around her.

Well, mostly. Nicky opens his eyes, but she waves him down. He looks in her eyes and frowns, but must see something he finds okay, because he nods and closes his eyes once more. Joe snuggles in closer to Nicky as he settles down.

Quynh is curled up on herself, and Andy is nowhere to be found. Keeping her breaths even, Nile makes her way out to the mouth of the cave.

Andy’s leaning against the car, studying the stars.

“Hey,” Nile says. A terrible introduction, but she doesn’t want to sneak up on Andy.

“Hey.” Andy doesn’t look over, eyes still on the sky. But she scoots a few inches to make room on the hood, and Nile joins her without further prompting.

“I wish I could tell you the sky would remain the same,” Andy muses, “But even that’s not true. It probably hasn’t changed much for Joe and Nicky yet. But Quynh and I…” She shakes her head. “Everything changes, Nile.”

She looks back into the cave. She can’t see their family, all piled together in the makeshift little nest of blankets Andy’d pulled out, but she knows they’re there just the same. “Not everything.”

“Even that. You’re new. Joe and Nicky barely don’t feel new anymore. Quynh…” She shakes her head. “I’m very old, Nile. And I was alive thousands of years before I met her.”

“But you did. And we’re here with you.”

Andy’s silent for a minute, then rubs her wrist. “You know, when I was mortal…it sucked, kid. I realized I probably didn’t want it as soon as I got it. There was so much more to do. You, them…finding Quynh. Being part of this world. But at least I  _ knew _ . I don’t think I like the not knowing again.”

Like it could be taken away again, Nile figures. And she can get that. Sees it in Joe and Nicky sometimes, she thinks, the painful reminder. Doesn’t feel it herself yet, but she’s busy reeling from other changes.

“We don’t know what’ll happen,” she eventually says. “No one else does either. Maybe you’re immortal now, again, because we really are forever. Maybe we’re not. But we have right now.”

Andy hums and keeps watching the stars, but she bumps Nile’s shoulder. “You’re pretty wise for a kid who’s been doing this all of five minutes.”

“It’s close to a year, now,” Nile corrects, trying to do the math in her head. 

“Like I said. Five minutes. Wise beyond your years.”

“Maybe you’re just too old to remember,” Nile retorts, which sends Andy genuinely chortling.

“So Nicky and Joe taught you some sass.”

“Nah, that’s always been there.”

“I’m sure, I’m sure. What has you out here, anyways?”

Andy knows what has her out of bed. “They’re better than they were,” she says. “But sometimes…”

“Yeah,” Andy sighs, turning her head skywards again. “Ain’t that a bitch? Time takes away everything. But there’s always something new.”

Andy huffs, probably twenty minutes later. “So, do you want to talk about it?”

“No.”

“You sure?”

“For now. Yeah.” Nile had done enough  _ thinking _ lately about killing. She’s not sure she can process anymore right now.

“Alright then. What do you want?”

Nile considers it. “Nothing. Just wanted some fresh air.”

Andy finally looks at her. “Alright then. Mission accomplished.”

“Mhm.” Nile takes the hint and gets up off the car hood. Surprisingly, Andy grabs her arm.

“Hey, Nile?”

“Yeah?”

“Everything I said…I meant it. Whether I’m immortal again or not, whether I die tomorrow or a thousand years from now or never. You showed up when I needed you the most. And I’ll always be grateful for it.”

Nile takes a shaky breath, suddenly feeling her throat tighten a bit, her eyes burn. “I…I miss what I used to have. How  _ different _ things used to be. But you all…you were what I needed, too. It’s none of your faults this happened to me, but you all…I could not do this without you guys.”

Andy wraps an arm around her shoulder, pulls her close. And they watch the stars for a minute longer.

Someday, they’ll change for Nile, too. Someday, the world will be as unrecognizable for her as it is for Andy.

But she’ll still have these people. And that might be enough.

There’s a voice from the mouth of the cave. Quynh, wrapped up in one of the blankets, calling for Andy, blanket-covered arm outstretched. Nile doesn’t understand the words, but the softness in the voice makes her melt slightly.

“Come on, kid,” Andy says. “They’re waiting for us.”

When Nile wakes up the next morning, the fire is completely burned out. Nicky and Joe are sitting up and talking quietly. Andy and Quynh though are still sleeping, wrapped up in each other, and Nile thinks it might be the most at peace she’s ever seen either one of them.

She closes her eyes again. Just for a few more minutes.

When she wakes up, they eat prepackaged food again, and Nicky and Joe make grumblings about getting a real lunch somewhere. Quynh looks like she wants to argue for a minute, looking around the cave, but Andy lays a hand on her arm and murmurs to her for a moment, and Quynh nods.

She also piles ancient weapons, clothes, blankets, jewelry, and art in the back of hers and Andy’s car. Nile’s never seen Andy carry more than a backpack and a weapon, but she doesn’t say anything about Quynh’s pile. If anything, she looks so unbearably fond.

They end up at a cafe, eating sandwiches outside in the sun. Quynh and Andy regale them with pieces of their trip, although that’s exactly how it seems. Pieces. That’s okay though. Some things are maybe just for them.

“So, where next?” Quynh asks, fiddling with a necklace probably a thousand years old in one hand and a sandwich in the other.

“I think that’s up to Nile,” Nicky says.

“Me?” She asks. “Haven’t we been, like, going everywhere for me?”

Nicky snorts. “No, Nile. We have not asked. We have dragged you along behind us. With good intentions, yes. But where would you like to go?”

“Not a destination. Not a hideout. What do you  _ want _ , Nile?” Joe asks her. “Months and months ago, I told you you were next, to get your time, to be taken care of. We got distracted. Neglected that. What do you need?”

“Your own oxygen mask first,” Nicky says quietly to her.

Nile opens her mouth to ask if this is about the stupid guy she killed in the ship and her breakdown after. But she doesn’t need to say it, because of course it is. Of course Joe and Nicky haven’t forgotten. The question becomes if it’s worth getting defensive over.

It’s not, she realizes pretty quickly. Not when they look at her that way.

Maybe it is time to worry about her own oxygen mask. It’s funny, because it feels like that’s all she has been doing. Worrying about herself, learning this life. But she’s been surviving, with pleasant periods in between. It’s time she stops and breathes.

“I want to go to college,” she decides. “I was gonna do it when I left the Marines anyways. I still want to.”

There is no judgement in anyone’s eyes. “What would you like to study?”

Nile shrugs. “Art? Law? I don’t know I…” She hesitates, but she knows she can just say it to them now. “I’m not saying what we do is wrong. Saving the people we’ve saved, it’s…I know it’s good. I  _ feel _ good. But there has to be other ways to do things, right?” She turns to Joe and Nicky. “An art historian or a lawyer might have more success getting stolen artifacts returned. Not just one they shove in their bag.”

Joe smiles. “Hey, don’t knock it. But I understand.”

“College can be good,” Nicky agrees.

Nile turns to Andy next, who keeps her face very neutral. She probably has opinions though. Lots of them. But she’s respecting Nile enough not to say them.

Maybe Nile is making mistakes. Maybe she isn’t.

“Well, whatever degree you do not get, you will have plenty of time,” Quynh muses. 

“Very true,” Nicky agrees.

Nile looks around. Right. Because she’s surrounded by people older than she can even imagine, still. She wonders what she’ll be studying when she’s as old as them.

“And on breaks, I want to travel,” she says. “Jobs are fine, but I want to see things. Learn some languages.”

“Alright,” Andy agrees. “I’m sure we have things we can show you.”

“And I want my own sword,” Nile adds, because she’s on a roll, and she might as well.

“That can certainly be arranged,” Quynh promises.

Nile just watches them, then shrugs. “Alright. That’s it. That’s what I want.” She hesitates a moment. “What are…what are you all planning to do?” She realizes then that there’s one more thing that she wants; she doesn’t want to lose these people.

“I want to be with animals,” Quynh announces, making Nile do a double take.

No one else seems to find that strange, just nods, so Nile nods too. “That sounds nice. So, are you a dog or a cat person?”

Quynh tilts her head. “Both. But that’s not what I meant.”

“Quynh and Andy are into bigger animals. Horses,” Joe tells her.

“Oh. Cool. I have…” Nile racks her brains. “I have never actually seen a horse up close and in person.”

“That is appalling,” Andy tells her cheerfully. “We’ll have to stick close to you, and you’ll have to come by when you’re not studying and learn to ride.”

Nile can’t help but smile back. “So, college town with farmland nearby. Cool. What’ll you guys do?”

Andy snorts. “They’ll follow you. These two love college.”

“We have quite a collection of degrees,” Nicky tells her. Andy just laughs, and Nicky glares at her. “Are you questioning that?”

“ _ Degrees _ . Right.”

“Knowledge is its own reward.”

She throws the last of her sandwich at him. “Come off it, Nicky. You’re not there for the  _ knowledge _ .”

“We certainly are—”

“You’re there for the kinky roleplay,” Andy concludes.

Nile sputters on her drink. “What the fuck?” She asks, at the same time Nicky protests.

Andy waves her hand and turns to Nile. “It’s their favorite little game. Pretend they don’t know each other and do some sort of meet-cute. Get jobs as professors and try to seduce each other. I’m sure they’ve done some  _ hot for teacher _ stuff.” Nicky protests that one, but Andy keeps talking. “They have this goal to be the weird couple on small campuses, make their way into campus legend.”

“You’re one to talk about campus legend,” Joe says, eyebrow raised. “Last time you went to a college class, you challenged the professor to trial by combat.”

“He deserved it.”

“So, what? Am I that friend you both have in common who hooks you up? Should I arrange a meet-cute? Some sort of blind date?” Nile asks. “I’m  _ not _ getting involved with anything kinkier. No naughty professor stuff.”

“No, I think we will be Joe and Nicky,” Joe says smiling. “Who are friends with Nile. But I can’t promise we won’t be some weird couple.”

“I can live with that.” She turns to Andy. “You’re not allowed to challenge my professors to trial by combat.”

“Visit me often, then, and I won’t be coming by and have an excuse to get pissed off at the inaccuracy of your classes.”

“I can do that.”

Nile just smiles for a minute, and watches her family. Feels light inside, like she’s getting a full deep breath when she didn’t realize she was missing one. Feels  _ easy _ , almost, in a way things haven’t felt in a while.

Things aren’t easy. College isn’t easy, immortality isn’t easy, the moral quandary of what they do isn’t easy. Nile’s sure living with the same people for eternity won’t exactly be easy either.

But it’s coming together. The family—they’re a  _ family _ , not her original one, but definitely her family and one she is proud to spend forever with—is coming together. She’s coming together.

And she has time, if it goes slowly. That’s fine. She can figure it out.

“So, about that sword…” She begins, and they laugh, and Nile smiles.


End file.
